FeedCrier, another way to act fast with RSS and IM
Adam Kalsey, a founder and former CTO of RSS vendor Pheedo, released a new service last night called FeedCrier that makes it easy to receive rapid notification of new items in an RSS feed by IM. The service currently supports only AIM but Kalsey says that will change soon.
Context & Ripple Effects
Adam Kalsey comes to FeedCrier after helping build Pheedo, whose earlier RSS analytics tool treated feed activity as something publishers could measure. FeedCrier applies the same RSS familiarity to delivery: it routes newly published feed items to an IM client rather than leaving readers to check feeds on their own.
The launch is narrowly scoped to AIM, making notification speed the product rather than a replacement for RSS itself.
First-order effects
- FeedCrier users can receive alerts for new RSS items through AIM, reducing the delay between a feed update and a reader seeing it.
- AIM becomes FeedCrier's sole delivery dependency at launch; users outside that client are excluded until additional support arrives.
Second-order effects
- RSS publishers and readers gain a distribution path built around immediacy, making the timing of feed updates more consequential than periodic feed checking.
- FeedCrier's usefulness is tied to AIM's reach and reliability, concentrating its early product constraints in a third-party messaging platform.
Third-order effects
- If RSS readers increasingly value alerts over inbox-style feed browsing, feed services will compete on delivery latency and endpoint integration as well as feed management.
- The move points toward notification layers sitting between publishers and audiences, with messaging clients becoming part of the distribution stack.
The trend: RSS is evolving from a pull-based reading format into an alert-driven distribution channel, with messaging clients serving as delivery endpoints.