With the advent of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) the internet isn’t the same anymore. You can get updates about your favorite site without actually visiting it. You just need to subscribe to the Rss feed and the updates can be read in a web-based or desktop Rss reader.

However, there aren’t any good standalone applications that could just give you real-time updates about specific sites in form of pop-ups, so that you don’t need to constantly check your Rss reader. Feed Notifier solves this problem. Its both feature rich and efficient.

Be the first one to comment on your favorite blogs’ posts:

Feed Notifier is a Windows application that resides in the system tray and displays pop-up notifications on your desktop when new items arrive in your subscribed RSS or Atom feeds. The pop-up notifications look like this:

Pop-Up Updates in Feed Notifier

This helps you quickly read what is being posted on a website and if you are a regular commentator you can be the first one to comment. Feed Notifier is for you if you want a news aggregator that focuses on real-time feed notifications and leaves out all the other stuff that comes with most other Rss readers.

Feed Notifier Settings and Pop-Up Behavior:

Feed Notifier is highly customizable to your requirements. You can also change the way the pop-ups appear, the display time and their position can be changed as required.

Feed Notifier Settings

The options in the above screenshot are pretty self explanatory. You can enable Feed Notifier to check for updates automatically or disable automatic checking.

Pop Up Options - Feed Notifier

In the Pop-Up options screen, you can select the duration for which the pop-up appears along with its theme and position where it appears on the screen according to your convenience.

Right Click Task Bar Menu - Feed Notifier

After installation, Feed Notifier Icon would show up in the Windows system tray and you can access various options like adding a new feed or changing setting by right clicking on the icon.

If you want you can manually update the feeds or stop the updates completely if you don’t want to disturbed with updates for some time. A new feed can also be added directly from this menu.

Once you click on “Add Feed” you can subscribe to the feed and select specific update intervals for it. If a site updates frequently you can even select 10-15 minutes of interval to check for new updates. You can set it to even less, if you want to be the first one on the scene.

Here we added TechCrunch’s Rss Feed, and since it updates very frequently we can set a time interval of just 15 minutes.

Subscribing to a new Feed - Feed Notifier

Get Real-time Twitter Updates in Pop-Ups:

You can setup Feed Notifier to get real-time twitter updates for you. Its a bit tricky as compared to subscribing to a normal feed, as RSS feeds from Twitter require authentication.

To subscribe, you’ll need to add your username and password to the feed URL. (This isn’t terribly secure, and you definitely shouldn’t do this on a public computer). To understand this complete process, please check out the developers instructions about how to implement real-time Twitter notifications  here.

Let us know what you think in the comments section.