Billy the Martian

I

IM/RSS

September 20th, 2004 | Category: General

I’ve just stumbled across a couple different programs that seek to intertwine
different communications environments.

The interesting one is called “Gush”. It’s for Windows, but it’s still
interesting anyway. It combines Jabber-style IM with a pretty RSS-feed reader.
You can find it here.

There’s something interesting about mixing Jabber and RSS, but I can’t really
put my finger on it. The only things I can think of that they have in common is
that they’re both XML based, and they are both the kind of program that you
leave running all day while you do “real” work. That seems like an
odd marriage.

If I was in the prediction business, I’d throw out a wild guess that in
5 years, email will have been drowned by spam and abandoned, and that
people will be doing instant messaging (and protecting their contact
lists aggressively) instead, with blogs and RSS replacing discussion lists.
But I’m not sure how strongly I agree with that. It could just be the result
of fighting another spam battle recently on top of seeing two dozen stories
over the last couple days on how big blogging has gotten. But, the instant
messaging thing gets a lot more useful and interesting when everyone has
always-on connections and/or data-enabled cellphones.

Thoughts, anyone?

6 comments

6 Comments so far

  1. Wes Carr October 26th, 2004 3:45 pm

    Actually, Gush runs on Linux and OSX as well :) We think IM and RSS is an interesting fusion, because it allows you to access and control the different kinds of conversations you frequently have. We also felt that IM could be a big help in discreetly and quickly disseminating interesting news. We plan to explore this more and love to hear what others think, so thank you!

  2. Tony Cheung October 26th, 2004 9:20 pm

    XMPP (the protocol behind Jabber) is ideal for transporting RSS feeds. Right now, most RSS readers poll the RSS feeds periodically to check for updates. On the other hand, if using XMPP, RSS feeds are being pushed to the clients in near-real-time. This solves a lot of scalability problems.

    You can actually try RSS feeds in any Jabber client, by using a service called jabrss. I have an article here which describes about it, http://www.chatopus.com/articles/jabrss.html

    Happy Jabbering!

  3. Bill O'Hanlon October 26th, 2004 10:30 pm

    Linux and OSX? Cool! What about FreeBSD? :-)

  4. Wes Carr October 27th, 2004 1:09 am

    Bill, we haven’t built for FreeBSD, I will check if it is a possibility. As for RSS over XMPP, that’s exactly what we do with the PubSub integration that we offer in Gush 1.2. Instant news delivery, and continuous searching. More info here, if you are interested. http://www.2entwine.com/features/pubsub.html

    Cheers.

  5. Wes Carr October 27th, 2004 12:18 pm

    Bill, you should be able to use something like LinuxMode under FreeBSD to run Gush.

  6. Bill O'Hanlon October 27th, 2004 7:47 pm

    Wes, I’ll give it a try, but the odds are against me. The Linux mode solution also requires having the right combination of Linux Firefox, Linux Flash, and assorted Linux X shared libraries — I’m not too optimistic.

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