USA Today Via AIM

According to a posting on EContent (and The Editors Weblog here), USA Today has partnered with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to provide news through instant messages.

This post says that via IM, users can search current and archived headlines on USAToday.com and set up "real-time news alerts."

AIM users may input keywords and when stories are published on USAToday.com containing those words, AIM users will receive an instant message with a headline, article summary, and link back to the complete story. Readers may also use the interactive service to browse and search current and archived USATODAY.com headlines.

I thought this was a pretty ingenious idea, so I decided to click on over to USA Today's Web site to find out more. Well, I may not be the best at navigating around the Web, but I couldn't find anything about this new service on the site itself. So, I decided to give it a try myself and guide anyone who reads this through the process.*

1. Add "USA Today" to your AIM buddy list.

2. Send it an instant message. It will respond with a welcome message and instructions to type "alerts now" or "privacy" to set up news alerts or to read the privacy policy.

3. Type and send "alerts now." It will respond with two sending options: one is to edit news category alerts and one is to edit keyword alerts.

4. Choose news category alerts, copy, paste and send. It will then give you eight categories like "Election 2008" or "Celebrity News and Gossip" to choose from.

5. Pick the number of your category and send. You will receive a list of headlines and story summaries in that category. (The headlines are links to the full stories.) There are a limited number of headlines shown, so you can send "more" to get additional headlines or "menu" to return to the main menu.

With that, you're all set. You can play around, choose different categories, get news by keywords of your choosing, etc. But it's a quick and easy process, particularly for someone like me who spends a great deal of time using instant messaging. It's very intuitive, easy to understand and fast. And kudos to USA Today for even being able to throw in a link to an advertisement (it's not intrusive).

There's been talk of text message updates and the like for a little while now, so this seems like a logical evolution. I don't have text message capabilities on my phone, so that would be of no use to me. This, however, is quite useful. I've also never really be a reader of USA Today, and this just may change that. Other newspapers should be paying attention.



*Please be aware that I use Trillian as my instant messaging software, so the process could be slightly different on "real" AIM. But it should still be pretty simple.