An interesting service around Skype and feed reading is making rounds recently — anothr.com.

The idea is really simple. You add anothr.com to your Skype contacts and then "talk" with it with chat messages. To get help, you type "?" (just the question mark). To add a feed, you type "RSS + http://example.com/feed.address.xml". And whenever there is a new post on that blog or site, you then get it as a Skype chat message from Anothr.

Here is an example of me adding the feed address of Skype Developer Zone blog into anothr.com and receiving the most recent article after a short while.

I like anothr.com because it is dead simple, easy and hits the target right on the spot — like Skype itself is and everything around it should be.

A note about private feeds, though. It's not a good idea to use web-based services like Anothr to keep track of private blogs that you access with your username and password (and different services handle the credentials differently so it might not work in the first place). So use it only for public feeds available to everyone.

For "professional" blog readers who need to keep track of a zillion feeds across many different categories, and do things like flag, sort and manage them, Another is a bit too simple. But for the most of us who just want to keep track of what's happening on your favourite blogs and sites, Anothr is about as good as it can get and eliminates the need to sign up for yet another software or service just to read blogs and feeds. It reinforces our vision that Skype is increasingly about much more than just free calls. Sure, they have some early software bugs like some non-English characters are not transmitted correctly, but I'm sure they'll work it out.

Anothr.com themselves have a blog, too. Subscribe to it (using, of course, their own service) to keep track of the latest updates.