I have to confess, few things have excited me as much lately as immedi.at, a new service that will notify you by Instant Message any time a selected RSS feed is updated. Wow!

I’ve written in the past about how to make RSS (definition) a tool for decreasing, not increasing, your information overload. This is the next step beyond pulling high-priority feeds out of bulk folders so that new items in these key feeds are immediately discernible. Some feeds are even more important and time sensitive than that.

For example:

• There might be times when you want instant notification of anyone linking to your web site or blog – subscribing to the feeds searching for such links is a basic first step, but sometimes an IM might be especially important.
• You might want to be instantly appraised of any new press releases from relevant government agencies or business, before you publicly address what you believe to be their position on some matter of interest.
• You may want to develop a relationship with a certain blog wherein you consistently make comments on relevant posts promptly after those posts are made.
• Think of the application mashups possible! Using Tag Central, FeedDigest, FeedBurner and Immedi.at together, for example, I can get an IM whenever the term “search” appears on Emily Chang’s eHub, or in items tagged “web2.0” in del.icio.us, Furl.net, Technorati or Flickr. Just by visiting the page for this RSS feed: Select Web2.0 Sources on Search and telling immedi.at to monitor that feed. (If you’re curious, this is what is in that feed right now.) I can only imagine what sorts of things are possible…including outside the tech-sphere of topics.
• Using RSS in general will make you one of the most quickly and thoroughly informed people in your field; selecting key feeds from which to receive IM notification will take that timely knowledge to the next level.

This is a tool with incredible potential. That said, this particular implementation (immedi.at) is somewhat buggy so far. I’ve found that it works far better in Firefox than it does in Safari, and with MSN Instant Messenger far better than AIM. I’ve been in contact with Peter Brown, apparently the lead developer of immedi.at. He’s been incredibly helpful and engaged. That bodes well for the tool, as far as I’m concerned.

But this is a powerful enough way to leverage RSS that I expect there will be several more options available some time soon. As the web world further refines its handling of “attention,” I imagine new possibilities similar to this, currently unimagined, will probably emerge as well.

Technorati Tags: immedi.at, RSS, IM, web2.0