Push me, pull me, real time web: we’ve now got enough options available to us when choosing how to consume our favorite web content that we may as well start mixing things up a bit, no?
Push delivery technology company Superfeedr today released a new Chrome browser plug-in called Msgboy. (The first 200 people to use this link can get it.) The plug-in accesses your browser’s history and uses it to make a big list of web pages you like and feeds you’re subscribed to. Then it uses Superfeeder’s XMPP and Websockets technology to push new updates from those sources to your browser, in the form of a Chrome Notification. Click the plus and minus buttons in the pop-up and you can quickly train it to know what kind of notifications you want or don’t want to see. I’ve been using it this morning and like it a lot. There are a lot of feeds I’ve subscribed to that I don’t remember to check very often anymore; now they are in the corner of my screen all day.
Superfeedr’s Julien Genestoux says that push technology is now very widely used, but end-users don’t get to see it very often.
“The msgboy addresses just that : it sends you the web you care about and stores it in your browser. It’s a Chrome application that will silently build a small firehose of all the web services that you use online. It will show you some of these messages as HTML5 notifications.”
If you don’t like to be interrupted while online, if you need a perfectly polished UI or if you can’t handle a little bit of noise until the system is trained, then Msgboy probably isn’t for you.
For me, though, this looks great so far. I’ve now got Growl messages popping up in the top left corner of my screen, Tweetdeck messages in the bottom right and Msgboy in the top right. I am in news firehose heaven.
