Crying Out Loud — The Feed Crier Blog

A few weeks ago AOL promoted the Feed Crier AIM bot to a special status on their network. The idea behind it was to create better service for our users, and in particular make it easier for new users to sign up for Feed Crier. Unfortunately, there’s been a few glitches in the process.

For most of the last two weeks, you’ve been unable to talk to the AIM bot. Anything you say to it is greeted with a message of either “Feed Crier is taking a short nap” or “ACK! IM BOT : feedcrier is broken.” Let me assure you, Feed Crier isn’t broken. It’s humming along just fine, and FC users on other IM networks aren’t experiencing any problems. Once we get this glitch worked out with AOL, I’m sure everything will be fine, but for now, I’d suggest you move your Feed Crier subscriptions to Jabber or MSN.

If that’s something you want to do, email me personally at adam AT feedcrier.com and let me know your AIM screenname and your name on the other network. I’ll need to do some checking to verify that you actually own both accounts, and then I’ll move your subscriptions over.

Hopefully we’ll have this all resolved by the end of the week.

The AIM bot is behaving strangely right now. Looks like something’s going on over at AOL. The bot is always appearing online, even when we attempt to bring it offline. And it is always replying with a message about being too busy to handle requests — a message that we didn’t create.

We’ve notified AOL of the problem, but as today is the Independence Day holiday here in the US, we don’t expect any action on their part until tomorrow.

For the last couple of months, we’ve been talking to IMified, sharing war stories, and helping them out with some ideas on how best to manage the signed on bot portion of the service. The more we’ve talked, the more we’ve liked each other. We started exploring ways we could partner and work together, with IMified providing a publishing backend for Feed Crier and us providing an alerting service for IMified.

The more we talked and planned the integration, the more we realized how much more we could do for each other. One thing led to another, and today I’m happy to announce that IMified has acquired Feed Crier.

So what does this mean for you, the Feed Crier user? First of all, there will be no interruption in your service. You’ll be able to keep using Feed Crier the same way you always have. Feed Crier’s features will be folded into IMified and will now be known as IMified Alerts. Starting soon, all the functions of IMified and Feed Crier will begin to merge, and you’ll be able to use IMified’s other functions in Feed Crier.

The Feed Crier name will fade into the background and all the functions of the Web site, all the widgets, and the IM bot’s scripts and text will start to take on the IMified name. To make sure your transition is smooth and easy, all your subscriptions will continue to be sent via the Feed Crier screennames. All new users will use the new IMified name, and eventually we’ll start to seamlessly transition your stuff over to IMified.

By becoming part of IMified, we’ll be able to offer more features to our users. Maybe reblogging alerts directly to your blog from your IM client. Or subscribing to alerts from sources other than feeds (think Google Calendar, To Do list reminders, and more). With this acquisition, IMified will be able to offer a complete solution for other companies that want to provide IM access to their application.

I’ll be part of IMified, so if you like how I’m doing things, they’ll continue along the same track. We’re excited about where this is going, and we’re looking forward to serving you in the future.

Last week, Feed Crier reached a new milestone: one million alerts delivered since our launch last fall. We’re adding new users at an increasing rate, and have some interesting things coming on the horizon.

A new feature is being tested in Feed Crier. Tell Feed Crier “off” and it will pause your alerts until you tell it “on.” Any alerts you received while it was paused will be delivered when you turn it back on. Nice and simple.

The commands don’t show up in the help file yet, so telling the bot “help” isn’t going to give you anything on this. But later today the bot’s help screen will be updated to include these new commands.

We just added a feed of the top feeds. Quick, everyone go subscribe to the feed at once so that the Feed Crier Top Feeds feed will be on the Top Feeds list and appear in the Top Feeds Feed. It’s also available in OPML, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Back in October, we listed the top feeds that Feed Crier was tracking. We intended to make that a monthly thing — we’d tally up the top feeds every month and post it here to the blog. We’ve discovered some interesting things from this process — mainly that we really suck at regularly scheduled blog posts. That October post was the only one we ever did.

So in the fine tradition of programmers building things because they’re too lazy to do them manually, I present to you our Top Feeds page. This is updated in real time, up to the second. If thousands of people suddenly start subscribing to this feed about early English literature, we’ll have that right there on the top feeds.

Are you the sort of lemming who wants to find out more about a Top Feed or maybe even subscribe to one? Each feed in the list has a preview link (like this one for Techcrunch) that will show you what sort of things you can expect from the feed. And each feed has a Subscribe button you can use to drop it right on your Feed Crier account.

While we were at it, we added an Up and Comers list to show you the hottest feeds in Feed Crier. These are the ones that are getting a lot of subscriptions recently. Could the next big thing be hidden in there?

With all the feeds, if you click through to the Preview page, you’ll see a list of related feeds. Our staff of well-educated, free-range chickens spends their day (or is that “spend their days”? I’m sure a grammar nut will straighten me out) at Feed Crier world HQ pouring over feeds, looking for similarities between feeds. And thanks to those fowl, we’re able to bring you lists of feeds that go great together, like chocolate and peanut butter. Go ahead, look your favorite feeds over and see if there’s anything you might like.

With the Twitterbot down, are you missing your instant message stream of your friends looking for their socks? You know, you can subscribe to your friend’s timelines with RSS, and that means you can bypass the twitterbot and use Feed Crier.

Subscribe to http://twitterusername:twitterpassword@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss with Feed Crier and renew your IM client’s love afair with Twitter.

PS. Want to update your own twitter via IM? Our good friends at IMified have you covered.

update Mar 16 5:30pm The bot has been back up for an hour and is looking stable.

It appears that at least some of the MSN Messenger login servers are offline. This means that Feed Crier’s bot can’t log in, and from what I can tell, most other people can’t log in either. We’re monitoring Microsoft’s servers and as soon as they come back online we’ll bring the MSN bot back up.

update Mar16 9am The AIM bot is back online. The AIM bot isn’t working right now. Jabber and MSN are fine, and we’re working on troubleshooting the problem. To use either the MSN bot or the Jabber bot, add feedcrier@feedcrier.com to your buddy list.