Not long ago I wrote of a concept called immediate action, whereby you give the user the means to act on your content right there in the feed.

I opened my newly favorite news reader today and found another cool example of immediate action. Among the daily technotrivia, I found a game of Asteroids, ready to play. There was also a simple chat room at the bottom of the game, populated by other people reading the same feed item at the same time.

TechCrunch is serving it here in a Feb 05 2006 entry. The provider of the Flash game/chat room combo is Bunchball.com.

The approach is fun, but I wonder whether it can be viable in the long term. JavaScript and CSS have both been effectively “banned” from RSS and Atom content due to abuse or exploits. What remains to be seen is whether Flash will suffer the same fate. If Flash can survive the cut, this demonstrates a whole new arsenal of actions available to feed producers.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 15:50 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.