IM Feeds: Blog

Starting with yesterday afternoon, AIM kept on resetting (or closing) our connection to them everytime I tried to connect. In effect, it looks like they’ve blocked the imfeeds AIM bot from going online. While AIM has an ‘Open AIM’ platform, they impose the following restrictions: a bot can only have up to 10k buddies and not send more than 10k messages per day.

If those limits are exceeded, then the bot has to pay at least $3,500 in licensing fees to stay online. Since I’m not making any money off of IM Feeds (it started as a service that I needed for myself), that amount of money is obviously out of my reach.

Unless AIM changes their policy on non-profit bots, or they let imfeeds back online, it looks like the bot will stay offline.

-John

Update: Looks like the AIM bot is back online, but let me know if you’re experiencing any problems with it.

Last week we had some self-inflicted problems with the Feedburner service but thanks to their great support team those problems have been resolved. And as a result our service is more reliable and scalable than ever.

A few changes from the upcoming the next generation of IM Feeds have been ported into the current version. The changes are:

• Automatically find RSS/ Atom feeds in a URL. For example, it’s now possible to subscribe to Slashdot using the following command:
  sub slashdot.org
  We hope this will make subscribing to feeds a bit easier.
• Ad-frame: We’re looking into various ways to keep the service afloat without being too intrusive. As such, we’re now trying out adding an ad-frame above the link content. Please let us know what you think about the ad-frame!

We’re working hard on the next release and are hopeful it will be available soon. But in the meantime let us know what features and improvements you would like to see.

IM Feeds Team

We’re experiencing some issues with our AIM bot and have contacted AOL to get the problem resolved. We apologize for any inconveniences.

Stay tuned.

IM Feeds Team

Update: for the most part all bots, including the AIM bot, look to be back online and responding. Please let us know if you’re still experiencing problems.

The past month we’ve gotten some attention from various news sites/ blogs, and we thought we’d share them here in case you aren’t using IM Feeds yet and would like to learn more about it.

MakeUseOf

All in all, I really like this service because there are a ton of different uses for it. If you already have a lot of feeds (like me) but don’t want to have to check your reader for the latest stuff, it makes for a good snapshot of “right now.”

ReadWriteWeb

All in all, IM Feeds does the job it was meant to do. When adding a feed, you won’t immediately receive any updates. However, once they started rolling in I saw them in my instant messenger before seeing them in Google Reader.

Startup Meme

If you’re sick of getting updates by manually refreshing websites, then you should give IM Feeds a chance.

Let us know if you’ve written something about IM Feeds and we’ll be sure to add you to the above list!

IM Feeds Team

Do you use FeedBurner? Want to give your users the ability to receive updates via IM? Check out the IM Feeds FlareUnit:

http://www.imfeeds.com/flareunit.xml

To add the IM Feeds flare, use the following procedure:

1. Login to your FeedBurner account
2. Select the feed that you want to add the Flare for
3. Click on the ‘Optimize’ tab at the top
4. Select ‘BrowserFriendly’ on the left menu in the ‘Services’ category
5. Click on the ‘More subscription options’ link located below the Google subscription option
6. Enter the following URL into the given feed flare input box:
   http://www.imfeeds.com/flareunit.xml
7. Click ‘Add’
8. Make sure the check box next to the newly added IM Feeds subscription option is checked
9. Click ‘Save’
10. Done!

This will give your readers a novel and quick way to receive your latest news, and make sure to let us know of other ways you think IM Feeds could support your blog/ website.

We’re making first steps in providing better support to bloggers and other content publishers by making it easy to create your very own IM Feeds badge:

Click here to create your own IM Feeds badge

This is but a small step to make IM Feeds a tool that helps to attract repeat-visitors to your site. We’re looking to launch a more complete suite of publisher tools down the road, but wanted to get at least the basics out the door asap.

As always, please let us know about any features you would like to see us add to the IM Feeds service!

IM Feeds Team

Since launching the service a bit more than a week ago, we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback and a continuous stream of people have signed up to use IM Feeds. Unfortunately, our servers weren’t fully up to the task of dealing with this onslaught of demand, and one of the main servers yesterday decided to lock up. That caused a cascade effect which prevented people from doing anything on the IM Feeds website and service.

We would firstly like to apologize for any problems you’ve encountered, and wanted to let our users know that we’ve ordered new hardware to meet the demand and are working feverishly to prevent such lock-ups in the future.

On another note, we’ve also added some new commands based on feedback from a user:

• list
• on <feed_url>
• off <feed_url>

The list command acts the same as the feeds command, but some users have grown used to the former from other services, so we’ve added it for general usability. The on/ off commands allow you to turn on or off notifications for a given feed. Instead of unsubscribing to feeds, you can now simply turn notifications on or off to your liking. The commands themselves function like the sub/ unsub commands, in that you pass them the RSS/ Atom feed url that you want to turn notifications on/ off for. For example:

off http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

Turns off notifications for the Slashdot feed, and

on http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

Turns notifications back on for the Slashdot feed. Additionally, you can use the keyword ‘all’ with these commands in lieu of a feed URL. I.e. if you want to turn notifications off for all of your feeds, do:

off all

To determine whether notifications for a feed have been turned off, use the feeds/ list command. If notifications are turned off, then there will be a (*) next to the feed name.

Thank you for using IM Feeds,

IM Feeds Team

One of our developers, John, is originally from Switzerland and a huge soccer fan (especially now that Switzerland is co-hosting). Naturally, he wanted us to point out that for other people that want to stay informed about the latest news/ results you just need to send the following command to the imfeeds buddy:

sub http://en.euro2008.uefa.com/rss/index.xml

Or if you prefer, type ‘http://en.euro2008.uefa.com/rss/index.xml’ into the top right bar on the website once you’re logged in.

Go Switzerland!

IM Feeds Team

When launching IM Feeds, our goal was to get a moderate amount of attention to see how our systems are holding up and get some better statistics about bottlenecks/ performance issues. And thanks to social media it’s never been easier to get your name out and start getting early adopters! Digg, Reddit and Slashdot were the mediums of choice to get the ball rolling, and after only a few submissions other people started picking it up and posting it on their blogs and spreading it through social bookmarking sites. Much to our surprise, the biggest traffic source ended up coming from Stumble Upon, followed by a variety of blogs and Twitter users that found out about IM Feeds through KillerStartups.

To track our news coverage, we used Google Analytics for identifying website/ blog referrals, while Summize was used to stay on-top of Twitter traffic. The biggest surprise that came out of this analysis though was how fast information travels around the world. Some of our currently most active users are from China, India, Paraguay and many other non-English speaking countries. And thanks to this revelation we’re making internationalization a priority for our next release, alongside making it even easier to add and manage RSS alerts.

Hope this provides a slight glimpse into the world of free social media advertising!

IM Feeds Team

PS: Here are just a few of the various, diverse websites/ blogs/ twitters that have mentioned IM Feeds recently:

• MiBlackBerry
• THWS (Chinese)
• GenBeta
• Social Media (Japanese)
• http://twitter.com/webleon
• http://twitter.com/bgtasoft

To help keep in touch w/ users, and to keep you guys posted on what we’re working on, we’re launching the IM Feeds Blog! We’ve had a great launch and have been working hard to make the experience as smooth as possible. Much work has already been done and we’re going to add some unique features in the upcoming weeks that will make it even easier to get and manage RSS alerts.

Thanks for your continued support and please make sure to drop us a line either on this blog or to support@imfeeds.com if you have any problems, suggestions or anything else related to IM Feeds.

Thanks,

IM Feeds Team