Pimp Your Work - Improving Your Work Day Efficiency

Try the RSS bot for Skype!

by Tris Hussey on October 17th, 2006

I found this first on Chris Messina’s blog, FactoryJoe (his partner Tara Hunt is also a speaker at BBS and a cool chick from Calgary!) and Chris linked to Marjolein Hoekstra’s blog CleverClogs (a Dutch remark, I believe).  What is it?  A Skype bot (IM bots are generally automatic agents that do things for you via IM, in this cause using Skype) that delivers RSS feeds to you via IM.  Clearly this is not in tended to be your feed reader of choice.  That would be insane.  But you can follow one or two blogs with it or even a search feed.  Something that you’d like to know about ASAP.

The process is simple. You add Luobotou to your Skype buddy list and send a message with the URL of a blog you’d like to subscribe to,  I used PYW as my test.  PYW’s feed was autodiscovered and added.  Now, since none of us have posted since I added it … I don’t have anything to report on that front.

The folks who have put this out have a little site set up for it and let your enter your feed URL and create a little button that let’s people subscribe with Skype with one click (I think the site is getting a tad over loaded at the moment … so if the image doesn’t show up, click anyway once you’ve added the buddy).

This seems like a great, light way to get quick headlines and search results, assuming that their service is stable enough.

Tags: Skype bots, Luobotou, RSS bots, RSS reading, RSS tips

Share This

Related Stories

• A Skype application for the Blackberry that works? Maybe?
• Easy fixes for common install problems in Vista
• Gaim lets you encrypt your IMs, of course so does Skype
• Lifehacker’s Essentials for the “placeless office” … I can do a few better
• Save some time and money with desktop video conferencing

POSTED IN: Cool tools, Internet tips, Software tips, Time savers