Immediacy of Messages
Somewhat along the lines of the thinking about messaging that Russ was doing I’ve been thinking about using feeds at different paces. I use RSS feeds to get all my news. Seriously all my news. I don’t make a stop at any normal news source like most folks do. I can remain blissfully unaware of major world events if they don’t happen to come up in casual conversation or get blogged about on Engadget. No problem. But the reason I do that is I don’t want to suck up all the time in my day consuming the media circus, I have other things to do. I want to read my news in 30 minutes in the morning, done.
However there’s other stuff I want to use feeds for, like following comment threads on conversations I do want to participate in. I would like to get those updates immediately so that I can keep the conversation going. But I don’t want to get updates to Engadget as they come in as well, that would just be distracting. So I was thinking about adding options to OMGWTFBBQ to make some feeds update all the time and others only update on a “news cycle”. And I also had considered adding general RSS monitoring to an IM bot I run every once in a while.
But then I thought why not use use Jaiku instead of doing my own stuff. So I created what I guess would be a “personal channel” on Jaiku: #mikerbot that I can add and remove feeds from so that I can track them more realtime. They’re off in their own channel so I’m not spamming junk out to my Jaiku followers, and they come over IM nice and close to realtime. There are a few other services out there that do RSS to IM gatewaying. But I actually like being able to setup a subsection of a service I already use to do it. And I like the fact that there’s also a web page to go along with the channel, if I’m offline for a while and want to check up on what I missed there’s the set of updates pulled together on one page for me.
