Links: 4-17-2007

instantFeeds 1.0.3

New version of instantFeeds: version 1.0.3. It includes a two new features: you can now turn off your notifications by sending the command ‘off’ (kind of like an out of office feature) and turn them back on by sending the command ‘on’ and the notification you get sent now includes an approximately 255 character summary of the latest item. Additionally, I fixed the package naming (Wildfire recently had to change it’s name to Openfire and all the package names had to be updated as well) issues.

As always, you can check out the release notes, the source repository or just skip to the good parts and download the plugin.

Communication Multiplexers

From an interview with one of the developers on the twitter.com team:

I think the real power of Twitter is its ability to channel over different mediums at the user’s whim. IM, SMS, email, and the web are just transports as far as Twitter is concerned. Generally, you have to go out and get information via whatever medium that information is on. With Twitter, information can come to you via whatever medium you prefer. Or, if you want some space, you can easily turn off the information tap with a simple “off” command. That’s powerful.

I linked to a blog post by Tim O’Reilly a couple days ago that summarized this feature by calling it a ‘communications multiplexer’… There are other companies that do interesting things in this space in different ways: rasasa.net, zaptxt.com, feedcrier.com, etc… It’s also one of the ways I’d like to evolve the instantFeeds plugin I wrote: be able to send an email, IM or an SMS or maybe even message into a web page: get only the information you want, delivered using the medium of your choice.