Limitless Pulse

As of late, I’ve been putting a bit of time into Craigslist every day. Generally I’m shopping for furniture and slide projectors. To aid my search I’ve piped RSS feeds — which are created for any search made on Craigslist — into Google Reader so I can process the streams of mostly garbage that people are selling.

The first feeds I imported were for searches of “Eames” and “mid century” in the furniture corner of Craigslist. These brought me tons of over priced knock offs of over priced originals. I learned quickly while thrift store shopping, garage sailing and flea marketing that once an item had the word “antique” attached, it’s price became unreasonable. The same held true for these searches, so I dropped them.

In terms of furniture, the only valuable search I’ve come up with is “west elm.” This feed on its own throws ~40 items my way daily. Some stuff is over priced, but I’ve found a couple amazing deals. Unfortunately when I see the best stuff, other people are also seeing it and end up snatching it before I can make a move.

Similarly, I’m always looking to grow my slide projector collection. A very nice looking Kodak slide projector popped up in Google Reader yesterday evening. It was selling for $40, was basically in the neighborhood, and the post was only 20 minutes old. I emailed the seller while ideas on how I’d use it started bubbling up in my head. I heard back from him about an hour later and could barely finish reading the message through the tears… the projector had already been sold.

OK. If 20 minutes isn’t fast enough, how do I get tipped off to the best posts?

To monitor @lightwerk and @soundnoir Twitter mentions, I’ve been using Pingie to send me an SMS and an email each time it finds activity on those terms. It’s not the fastest service, but has kinda worked in these instances.

The slide projector posts are the most important to me, so I went to feed Pingie the RSS feed created for the local NYC search “kodak slide projector -car.” Car? Yeah, I had to obscure the idiotic car sale posts that some asshole was cluttering up my feed with. When I dropped the URL for my slide projector search into Pingie, I was confronted with an “invalid feed” error. The service was mangling the URL on import. It just wasn’t going to work. I set off to find another option, and with all the talk of FriendFeed launching real-time search last week, I thought it a good place to start.

In the past, I’ve used the invisible friend, or virtual friend, or the whatever it’s called, feature of FriendFeed to keep up with a few friends I couldn’t get to join the service. With it I’d add feeds from friends’ blogs, Twitter accounts, etc. to their virtual accounts then have those updates thrown to me via IM. It’s worked well. When I went to do the same for the slide projector feed, I found the feature had dropped off. The workaround I found functions beautifully.

I created a new private group named “RWW: Critical,” and added the Craigslist feed to it. I then configured the handy notification options to have the service send me an IM and an email whenever a new post pops up in that group.

Cool thing is, I can add any number of feeds to this one group and receive the same notification functionality group wide. I’m looking to add feeds covering my most important friends, artists, brands, etc.

What I’m looking forward to finding out is just how quickly posts get aggregated and piped to me. The virtual friend notifications always seemed to lag behind the actual Twitter tweets. Of course it couldn’t be instantaneous, but FriendFeed’s advertisements of “real time” have me curious to see just how fast it is. Pingie was relatively slow as well, so I’ll most likely move feeds from that service to this FriendFeed group.

Hands off, bitches. That slide projector is mine!

[Update] The real time aspect of FriendFeed applies to searches. Now I’m even more curious how fast or slow these notifications will be.