JeffBlais.com

Lately people have been disappointed (to put it lightly) with the fact that Twitter hasn’t re-enabled their IM and Tracking services. I had just started using it before they began having growth issues and now I miss the instant information at my fingertips.

While surfing around the Internet the other day I stumble upon a service called IM Feeds and it “delivers RSS updates to your Instant Messenger”.

So I decided to throw together this tutorial showing you how to use IM Feeds, Twitter (or any other service that provides RSS Feeds), and Twitter Search to regain tracking of information you are interested in.

1. Sign up for IM Feeds (currently in beta)

2. Goto Twitter Search & search for what you want to track. Add quotes around your search term if you want the whole term and not just the the individual words to be searched for.

3. Copy The RSS Feed To Use With IM Feeds

4. Take the copied RSS Feed and add it to your IM Feed Subscriptions

That’s it.

I have been using this since I found it and I have to say that it works farely well. The only thing that you loose in using a service like this is the fact that you don’t get instant notification as soon a message is posted but when IM Feeds checks for updates (I think about every 1-5mins) you will be sent the messages and you can continue to track the information that interests you while Twitter tracking and IM service is down.

I hope this is useful for some people. If you know of any other services that provide the same services please head over to my Friendfeed room and join the discussion.

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/jeffblais-com