Feed Crier is a new service that delivers feed updates via AOL Instant Messenger. It’s a very simple concept which brings feeds to the world of instant messaging.

To subscribe to a feed you simply send an AIM message to feedcrier with a ’subscribe’ message with the feed URL, such as

subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/gizbuzz

Then as the feed is updated, you receive instant message notifications with links to the feed items. The free version can track up to three feeds and is ad-supported (though in my brief trial of the service I didn’t see any ads). There’s also a Pro service which tracks an unlimited number of feeds, with no advertising and a couple of other features for $4 per month (about £2 a month).

Now it’s a neat little service, but I can’t really see a lot of use for it, unless you are often at a computer without feed-reading software but with AIM capabilites and want to check your feeds. But with loads of web-based feed reader solutions around, the use of Feed Crier, as far as I can tell, is fairly limited.

Still it’s an interesting service and an interesting implementation of RSS/Atom and all the rest and demonstrates the flexibility of aggregation technologies. But beyond an interesting concept, I don’t really see much practical use. I suppose it could come in handy where you can get to AIM but for some reason web-based aggregators are unavailable, or if you desperately prefer to only use a desktop aggregator and then go to use a different machine, but beyond that Feed Crier is only really a small proof-of-concept in my eyes.