This just in from the “RSS is plumbing” department:

Rasasa, an Amsterdam-based online service, is now offering RSS feed updates to your instant messenger client.

To check out how it works without creating an account, try their Quick Demo. You’ll get a couple of quick screens where you enter one of your IM accounts (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Google Talk, or Jabber) and get an explanation of how the service works.

The demo is serving the TechCrunch feed (a smart way to get noticed), the latest item of which is sent immediately to your IM client. (And I do mean immediately: I clicked “Next” in the browser and my IM window popped up within 2 seconds.)

If you create an account, Rasasa is currently allowing you to monitor up to 10 feeds for free. You can also configure your account to have Rasasa send your cell phone text messages if your IM is offline.

Whether people will want to pay to get more than 10 feeds is the real question. My guess is that this will happen among users who have become as dependent on RSS updates as most of us already have on email.

Sidebar:
This brings up an interesting discussion… Right now Atom and RSS are used primarily as an alternate means of getting information. Will they ever become the primary means? How often are feeds really used to deliver “mission critical” information? Without some semblance of guaranteed delivery, can feeds ever be used this way.

While I don’t think this service will replace the news readers of avid RSS/Atom users, I think it will fill a couple of small niches quite nicely:

1. Avid IM users who don’t want to mess with an RSS reader. This includes the modest subset called “every teenager on the planet.” A smart marketer at Rasasa should invest in advertising on MySpace. (Then again, will any of them pay to have over 10 feeds?)
2. Mobile users who have IM and web access on their cell phones. The text message capability is interesting, but a partial-text feed without a usable hyperlink would probably just frustrate most people.

Rasasa is still “in Beta”, which these days usually means “standard web application reliability applies.” (The only minor issues I saw were a couple of translation goofs, actually.)

Overall, its a smart mashup and a slick service.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 3rd, 2006 at 17:29 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.