The internet is undoubtedly the biggest information resource available to mankind today. Irrespective of where you are and what you do, you can visit Google News or any other such website to get the latest news from around the world.
Considering the huge information overflow online, you can have some excellent tools which help you to effectively organize the information flow and help you stay informed and up to date everyday. Let’s take a look at some of them.
If you’re always checking your RSS feeds for news, stories and other kinds of updates, here’s a really neat tool that may be your new best friend. IM Feeds is a service that takes your pre-existing list of RSS feeds and runs them through an instant messenger (IM) robot which will notify you as soon as a new article is posted. The simplicity of the service is one of its greatest attributes.
I am going through an big instant messaging phase at the moment, partly due to my growing addiction with Twitter. I’ve been getting all my Twitter updates sent to my Google Talk desktop app and this has got me increasingly interested in what other types of information I can get sent to my desktop IM client.
So I went looking for a free web-based tool, preferably a chat bot, that would send pre-selected RSS feeds to an IM program. After trying several that didn’t work as advertised (I won’t name any names), I finally ended up using ZapTXT - although the set-up didn’t exactly go too smoothly at first.
If you were to interview a broad cross-section of internet users and ask them about Google services, probably most of them would enthusiastically talk about Gmail or Google Reader. At the very least, they would mention Google’s superior search engine. But how many people do you think would discuss being able to set up customised RSS feeds in Google News? Or being able to download source code in Google Code? How many people would know that Google offers various possibilities for users to help improve their products?
Here are some Google services that need a lot more loving (cue Barry White music) :
