ING Direct - Feel Good News - Feel Good Post - Spend a Penny to Beat the Credit Crunch

What are News Feeds?
News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. Feeds are also known as RSS and the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.

How do I start using feeds?
In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader, a piece of software that checks the feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications.

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer. Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want it to receive.

If you click on the RSS button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader. Most sites that offer feeds use a similar orange button, but some may just have a normal web link.

Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Twitter users simply choose to follow the messages of any Twitter member they have an interest in and they will then receive brief text updates on a regular basis from that Twitter member they are following.