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Saturday, January 5, 2008

Pingie: RSS to SMS Utility

By: Kristen Cole

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Since Twitter is the topic du jour today, this little web app fits right in with the concepts of convergence, mobility, and New Media, especially for those users of Twitters out there that primarily utilize the service from their mobiles. Paul Stamatiou today reviews a nifty little utility called Pingie, the purpose of which is to take RSS feeds and send them to your mobile phone via SMS.

Pingie is was announced today by the folks over at UNEASYsilence with several suggestions on how you might use the utility. Obviously, you aren’t limited to the suggestions they have (deal of the day type feeds like Woot or Slickdeals), but those are some of the better applications. Others that spring to mind would be RSS feeds to any calendaring programs you may have set up, or any other type limited use alert system (update feed on a collaborative document in Google Docs?).

The applications are wide, varied, and endless. It is a simple service to use, too. Create your account on Pingie you can add feeds and later login to change settings. The system is simple to stop, if you need to; just reply to any Pingie SMS with the text “STOP PING”.

Paul points out the same thing I found to be slightly annoying in the service: a bit too much wasted space in the message. In SMS, real estate is highly valuable, and a bit of the info Pingie relays is “superfluous and redundant,” as Paul says.

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