I think this is more focused than RSS. Doing the same with an RSS reader would be fiddly and sort of out of it's use case. If you want regular polling (every 15s say) maybe your RSS reader can do that but it isn't natural.
There is something to be said for things being similar but not the same. This app can grow features in the direction of alerting, whereas an RSS reader wouldn't be growing in that direction without becoming bloatware because it's main job is to catch you up on reading material.
I can see myself using it, and it has been something I have consider building myself - although I had a different angle - an API for a person so you can send me a message (if I trust you... maybe I give each friend a different token!) and we can avoid using email or a proprietary chat alltogether. Such a service could work in tandem with this app.
Based on that you could make a distributed "facebook" of sorts.
Once the iPhone app of this come out I can see myself setting up a little nodejs server and aggregating some stuff to send down. Weather, email, SMS, maybe some favourite google searches (when they change) or hn.algolia.com searches.
Thing is, you don't want regular polling every 15s! It's 5760 requests per day! For EVERY SOURCE! Trust me, your device battery won't like it. Won't like it at all.
> although I had a different angle - an API for a person so you can send me a message ... and we can avoid using email or a proprietary chat alltogether
If you want to exchange messages avoiding email or proprietary chats, you have a wide variety of open chat protocols and free and open source chat applications to choose from. XMPP, Matrix, IRC, mastodon, rocketchat, mattermost, ... dozens of them!
There is something to be said for things being similar but not the same. This app can grow features in the direction of alerting, whereas an RSS reader wouldn't be growing in that direction without becoming bloatware because it's main job is to catch you up on reading material.
I can see myself using it, and it has been something I have consider building myself - although I had a different angle - an API for a person so you can send me a message (if I trust you... maybe I give each friend a different token!) and we can avoid using email or a proprietary chat alltogether. Such a service could work in tandem with this app.
Based on that you could make a distributed "facebook" of sorts.
Once the iPhone app of this come out I can see myself setting up a little nodejs server and aggregating some stuff to send down. Weather, email, SMS, maybe some favourite google searches (when they change) or hn.algolia.com searches.