“Real-Time” RSS Reading With Anothr

I don't know why we rather rarely speak of various RSS feed readers. Are we all totally satisfied with our reading experience? Well, I use Snarfer for my daily reading of news and other blogs and I can't think of a reason to move to another reader now. But there is one situation we should keep in mind: when you want to know that a blog is updated the second it gets the update. If I were involved in Digg deeply and actually tried to get into unofficial top diggers lists, I would really need to know of new posts on a number of very popular blogs immediately. Also if I participate in a discussion around some topic in the comments to a blog post and subscribe to RSS, it is better to be notified when someone replies to me immediately. Solution? Anothr.

You may remember from our previous posts in October and December about this Chinese startup that is here to enhance our reading experience (or at least make it more "real-time"). David Wilkinson reviewed the procedure of using Anothr to get Skype notification every time a certain RSS feed is updated. It seems to me that this Skype bot (another.com is the user name to be added to your Skype contacts) has become rather popular among Chinese users. Yesterday I got great news from the Chinese team behind Anothr: Anothr for Google Talk arrived. This means that you can now add anothr@gmail.com to your Gtalk list of contacts and start using it. After you add the bot to your contacts, you will receive a number of messages which will prompt you to choose your language, instruct you on how to subscribe to new feeds and unsubscribe and give you other tips on use of the bot. Knowing how many people have migrated to Gtalk from other messengers, I think you should give it a try. Of course, it is not the most feature-rich tool to actually read and manage all your subscriptions. This is why I would not advise you to import your OPML file to Anothr (while this is also possible with them) BUT if you need to know what happens on a blog as soon as it actually happens, Anothr is really a suitable option - with no installation or registration required.

The only disadvantage I can mention about Anothr is language: English and Russian (those languages I speak myself) on Anothr website and messages from the bot are rather awkward. But after all are you here to talk to a bot or to read news as soon as they arrive?