Squeet, what to do if you don’t want to RSS
I’m getting lots of emails wondering “what time will the Origami video be available?” I don’t yet know, sorry. I should know today sometime. But, that points out there’s lots of people who don’t yet use RSS News Aggregators (if you did, you wouldn’t care about what time something gets released cause you’d automatically have it the minute it was if you had an RSS aggregator). But, I know there’s lots of people who feel more comfortable with email than with RSS. So, here’s a solution. Use http://www.squeet.com/ – just enter the RSS feed you want to be warned about and it’ll email you every time that RSS feed is updated. I’ve been using it a few weeks and it works great.
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March 7th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Robert
Picked up on your March 2nd post regarding women bloggers.
Posted today a selection of 5 of them from around the globe on \’Serge the Concierge\’ ahead of International Women\’s Day.
Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://sergetheconcierge.typepad.com
March 7th, 2006 at 10:20 am
Yes, I think you would still care when something was released regardless of RSS.
Knowing when something is released and being notified that something is already released are two completely different things.
March 7th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Yeah, but 90% of knowing what time something will happen is just to make sure you are among the first to be able to watch it. In an RSS world, why do you care about that unless you just want to game Memeorandum? In which case you\’ll have your RSS Aggregator check the feed every few minutes and notify you when it\’s up, no?
I get a Squeet email within a few minutes of publishing something new, so it works pretty well to let you know as soon as something new is up.
March 7th, 2006 at 11:07 am
I really like using the Google reader (http://www.google.com/reader). I just keep it open in a tab in Firefox and read when I want to take a break.
March 7th, 2006 at 11:11 am
What abot PubSub? They email you also and have been doing it for a while.
March 7th, 2006 at 11:29 am
\”if you did, you wouldn’t care about what time something gets released\”
Is that so? You don\’t just think people are, well, impatient and excited?
March 7th, 2006 at 11:39 am
Stop trying to corner him on his words, guys. He told you how you can check out when the video will be released, he told you how you can be notified.
Isn\’t that enough?
March 7th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
I found Squeet to be really slow in delivering the content to my email. I like RSSFwd much better.
http://www.rssfwd.com
March 7th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
\”you’d automatically have it the minute it was if you had an RSS aggregator\”
Actually direct email would be closer to instantaneous in many cases.
RSS feed consumption is largely a polling affair for direct RSS desktop client. Because most RSS aggregator honour the settings in the RSS feed which suggets how often the client should poll, many people will not get an update to a feed immediately. In the absense of that setting, the client will likely have a default polling frequency set (e.g. my Newsgator Outlook client is set to check every 60 mins). Further, if one goes through an aggregation service, the effect could be cummulative.
There are protocols/mechanism for signaling notification of RSS feed changes, but those don\’t currently tell my desktop client to go and look for updates.
March 7th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Following on from my commment. Squeet is therefore potentially faster if their servers are frequently polling a feed or are notified of changes. Unless of course you are using a POP-based email client where you poll for email infrequently…
March 7th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
[...] Scobleizer had blogged about Squeet a website which sends blog posts through mail. I generally read all the blogs through mails. I use a service called Rssfwd. So far my experience with that website has been good. Posted in Uncategorized | [...]
March 7th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
[...] Scobleizer had blogged about Squeet a website which sends blog posts through mail. I generally read all the blogs through mails. I use a service called Rssfwd. So far my experience with that website has been good. Posted in Blogs | [...]
March 8th, 2006 at 7:25 am
Feedlinx is also a great RSS email service.
http://www.feedlinx.com
I use it to read your blog and love it. It polls every 15 minutes for new messages. It even has built-in feed tracking so I can switch between email and ANY aggregator. Feedlinx keeps track of the “read” status across machines, aggregators, and email.
March 8th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
FeedBlitz is the web’s leading RSS to mail service that serves readers but gives publishers nsight into metrics (with FeedBurner), email customization and subscriber management.
March 8th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
FeedBlitz shares your email address with publishers, so unless you don’t care about giving your email to hundreds of publishers (feeds you subscribe to) you should stay away from FeedBlitz. Not to mention FeedBlitz provides only daily digest emails, which is not the greatest way to stay on top of current events.
March 8th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Nice find, Scoble! I checked Squeet out and all of the others mentioned on here. I would have saved some time just taking your advice, because Squeet is my personal favorite. Here’s what I learned:
FeedBlitz - Takes RSS back a step, IMO, because they share email addresses with publishers. And, unless your happy with daily digests…you have to pay.
FeedLinx - Pretty cool, but I didn’t see any delivery options. I like to get some of my feeds “instantly” and others daily. If you use email forwarding, you lose the read-status feature.
RSSFwd - No delivery options for digests; got “Application Error (Rails)” when I tried to subscribe to a feed. Bookmarklet for subscribing is a good idea.
Google Reader - I like it and think it’s got a good UI (I’m also a gmail/tags fan)…but it’s not RSS to Email, and there’s no convenient way to read items offline or forward articles to friends. I didn’t seen any OPML import / export, either.
PubSub - Pretty cool concept, but not an RSS aggregator. It does keyword searches across many sources, and you can use an RSS reader to track the searches…or download a sidebar.
Squeet’s the only one that does everything I need. There are some things I want, though, like more delivery options (twice a day digest, for example). Hopefully that’ll be coming along soon.
I’ve been getting almost instant delivery on feeds set to “when available.” The rest are daily feeds (which is nice, because I don’t like to get TOO distracted at work). :-)
I imported my OPML file, set up email filters, and have been very happy with it. I also installed the Firefox extension, which makes subscribing to feeds a breeze (avail. for IE & Google Toolbar, too).
“Better” is in the eye of the beholder, and this is just my 2 cents…
March 8th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Fyahs did a great job checking out all of the services. Thanks for including Feedlinx. ;)
We are a newer service and are very nimble. Try our service now with your on-demand feeds and I’ll guarantee you a great set of scheduling features in the very near future (next week!).
The read-status feature does work with the mail-forwarding. If you read a post in your feed reader, you won’t receive the same post via email.
March 10th, 2006 at 3:18 am
Good work fyahs! A similar service not mentioned above is Queoo: http://www.queoo.com. It is still under development, but feel free to try it anyway. :)
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:36 pm
>>I’ll guarantee you a great set of scheduling features in the very near future (next week!).
April 8th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
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