Twitter is a great update and notification system. You can send it messages with a variety of tools including Instant Messaging, Text Messages and the Twitter website itself. Twitter’s mission statement reads:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
One of the most useful features about ‘new web’ is feeds. Getting updated whenever the sites you check change is probably the best enhancement to come out of the internet. No more wasting time checking sites that haven’t updated yet.
TwittFeeder asks the question: What are your favorite websites doing? It allows you to easily subscribe to feeds using twitter. Once subscribed you’ll get updates via Direct Message.
To use it first start following TwittFeeder. Once you are it will automatically start following you. When it does you can start subscribing to feeds. To do so simply send ‘subscribe http://feedurl’ to twittFeeder as a direct message. If you’re using one of the standard Twitter tools this is accomplished by sending the following message to twitter:
D twittFeeder subscribe http://feedurl
That’s it! once you’re subscribed twittFeeder will start sending you direct messages using any notification system you’ve already setup in Twitter. The great thing about this service is if twitter ever adds another notification type you automatically get your feed subscriptions sent there for free.
The notification system twittFeeder uses is whatever your notifications are currently sent to by Twitter since it simply sends you the updates via a Twitter Direct Message. If you’re not a user yet you should be but the notifications currently supported are:
- Text Message
- Instant Messages
- Twitter website
- Lots and Lots of 3rd party applications
To unsubscribe to a particular feed simply send ‘unsubscribe http://feedurl’ as a Direct Message to twittFeeder.
Disclaimer: at the moment twittFeeder is scheduled to run every 10 minutes so updates won’t necessarily be immediate. That number might go up or down depending upon usage and several other factors.
Randy Aldrich 