Imified, makers an IM interface for some common productivity tools, just acquired FeedCrier, makers of an IM based RSS feed alert system. The two startups talk about the deal on their blogs (Imified, FeedCrier), but shy away from the terms of the deal. Imified plans on integrating the RSS alerts to its current list of IM services, calling them “Imified Alerts”. Users will also be able to get updates through IM enabled phones and Imified’s widget. Zaptxt and some other competitors have a similar RSS alert services for IM and mobile phones. Alerts will be added the the growing list of productivity tool API’s any of the world’s over 340 million IM users can connect to through Imified on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Google Talk. By Talking to the Imified bot on these IM clients, you can carry out tasks on blogging platforms (Blogger, MoveableType, WordPress, LiveJournal), Basecamp, 30 Boxes, Remember the Milk, Twitter, Jaiku, amongst others. Through their own widget API, developers can also “Imify” their own services on to their IM bot platform. Imified was launched in February of this year and generated some considerable interest in the forums. Co-Founders Dave Hoff and Anthony Webb built the application without actually meeting each other. They are based in Florida and were serving over 15,500 users back in April. → Read More
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. Free accounts are limited, but premium subscribers can monitor an unlimited number of feeds, remove ads in the alerts, use a web interface to manage their alerts. Unlike other similar services FeedCrier also delivers item summaries and alerts received when users were offline. Premium accounts are $4 per month. There are other services available that are better for this in some ways, but there’s plenty of room for competition. I think this is an important class of web tools, for consumers seeking to jump on sales quickly and professionals doing time sensitive work. Competitors include Peter Brown’s immedi.at (interviewed here), Eduard Sherstnev’s Zaptxt (watch this company in coming weeks) and the most sophisticated of them all, Rasasa, from the Netherlands. These other services are not limited to AIM, they offer autodiscovery bookmarklets and both Zaptxt and Rasasa incorporate SMS and email alerts as well. Rasasa’s push technology is the smartest, but isn’t supported by all US mobile vendors. I’ve long thought that FeedBurner should team with one of these companies and sure enough, it was FeedBurner VP of business development Rick Klau’s blog where I learned about FeedCrier. Klau has a FeedFlare widget that publishers can use to provide a link to FeedCrier alerts for their feeds. The same could be done for other services with relative ease via the FeedFlare API. I think that increasingly powerful RSS to IM tools will be in demand as RSS use continues to grow – particularly in business. → Read More
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