Jan Geirnaert IM'd me this morning to point out the new service launched this month called simply "RSS Robot" from Anothr.com. (yes, no "e"... come on, that seems to be the "Web 2.0 motif"!). It's one of those interesting "mashup" kind of services that is rather obvious when you think about.... and a quick Google search shows that there are others out there offering a similar IM service, although none that I could see for Skype. (For example. a bot that does RSS for Windows Live Messenger.)

Here's what Another.com does... you subscribe to an RSS feed through the service and then you get a Skype IM whenever something new is posted to that feed. IM bots have been around for ages.... this is one that links you to RSS feeds. The service is very simple:

1. Add "Anothr.com" to your Skype contact list
2. Open a chat session to "RSS Robot", the name of the contact now added.
3. Type in "RSS + feedurl" (ex. "rss + feeds.feedburner.com/DanYork")
4. You will receive a chat reply message indicating success - and, it seems, another chat message with the latest post in that feed.

Very simple and easy. Type "?" in the chat window and you'll see the other options. You can type "rss list" and get a list of the feeds to which you are subscribed. "rss - feednumber" will unsubscribe you (where feednumber is the number of the feed shown in the list). It also has something for an "alert time", which isn't overly clear but I'm guessing might be either the frequency it checks or how often after an item is posted it notifies you.

Now an obvious question is - why would you want to do this? Given that we have RSS readers that provide alerts and so on, why would you want an IM message when a feed is updated? The answer, for me, would be that if you had a feed that you wanted to very closely monitor, it's a great way to get an alert. I can think of a couple feeds that might merit this level of attention for me. Most feeds I'd just look at it in my reader whenever I get the chance to do so... but in a couple of cases an IM might be useful.

One question I would have is how often the service hammers the actual feed URL. If it is designed to send an IM as soon as something is posted, it would seem to make sense that it would check a feed frequently. How often? Every 5 minutes? 10? 15? 1? I could see the added traffic from the bot being somewhat of a concern if it checks frequently... although you could see it caching the feed for all subscribers, so it might not be that heavy of an impact.

Another obvious question is - what is the business model? It's not clear at all what Anothr.com is up to in the long term. They have a blog, but I can't see much there about what they are trying to do... unless, of course, that information is in the Chinese posts that are mixed in with the English. Are they looking to offer premium services? Are they looking to sell or license the technology?

Don't know, but in the meantime, of course, they are building up a nice database of users and URLs from people who use the service. :-)

Anyway, thanks, Jan, for the interesting distraction this morning.... may it also be a fun little distraction for other readers as well.

Tags: anothr, rss, skype