Anothr = Skype + RSS Robot

Shanghai based Chinese startup, Anothr.com, only two months old since its first beta release has shown us the brilliant side of chinese market. It is also spotted by O’Reilly Radar ealier this week.Anothr (formerly known as Luobotou2.0) is a Skype based RSS Robot and allow you read RSS feeds on the Skype. With the alerts being sent straightly to your Skype when your favorite feeds are updated, your daily blogs/news reading experience will be much simplified.

The user experience with Anothr is very simple. By adding Anothr.com as your Skype contact, you can just ‘Chat’ to this Anothr Robot for the subscription, retrieving, deletion or listing your RSS feeds. For example, Simply type the RSS feed on the chat window, the robot will verify it automatically and add it into your subscription list. You can also ask for help by typing ‘?’, the user guide with the available commands will be shown on the window(check the screenshots below). The new posts from your subscription will be ‘pushed’ onto the chat window.

2007 might be a live-or-die year for RSS since almost all the desktop web browsers will be able to handle RSS feed, including the lastest Internet Explorer 7. It is a brilliant idea to pick up Skype as the host of its robot. Skype client can be running on all kinds of operating system – Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even Pocket PCs, which means Anothr can actually push the RSS feed to anywhere without the installation of any extra RSS aggregator.

The service of Anothr.com is currently mainly restricted to the ‘chatting’ with the robots, the company will focus on the improvement of the Anothr.com portal and server more online services to enrich the user experience, told by the founders of Anothr, Jim Sang, Stan Chu and Gangqiang Liu.