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Hi HN. We are testing out a new feature on Notifo: email notifications. We've setup a special landing page for you to play with it. Once you enable the email n

Hi HN. We are testing out a new feature on Notifo: email notifications. We've setup a special landing page for you to play with it. Once you enable the email notifications, you'll be emailed anytime someone replies to one of your comments on an HN thread, so you won't have to sit on HN all day frantically refreshing the page :) Also, if you want updates for your HN Karma points, I am using another site called Femtoo - http://femtoo.com/ http://femtoo.com/ - (which also supports Notifo) that will check my karma every so often and notify me when it changes. Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback! Also feel free to use this thread as a reply playground to test out the new emails. Hopefully these email notifications will also help Android and BB users that have push email, while we are still working away at native clients; but of course this feature works for anyone that has an email account :)

PStamatiou 16y ago
Also - for services that have many events, we recently added event settings to the site (previously was just in the iPhone app). That means you can fine tune how, when and where notifications are delivered (including email). The HN service only has one event (Replies) but other services like Push.ly have many (@ replies, DMs, favorites, and so on). If you use push.ly for example, you can access event settings here: http://notifo.com/user/settings_events/11 http://notifo.com/user/settings_events/11 Happy Thursday, Stammy
siculars 16y ago
I signed up for your service, I know it will be useful to me. Thanks for putting it out there. The only concern I have is that it seems a bit self serving that a YC funded company gets, what seems to be, preferential treatment by having their own field in the users table. I feel you should scrape like everyone else ;)
- jazzychad 16y ago
  Scraping is a waste of resources for both parties involved. So is API polling to some extent. If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications. Twitter is great at this with their Streaming API. Facebook is trying, but their real-time API is a bit lacking at the moment. We're just trying to build something people want, and according to pg, he has received many requests for email notifications on HN, and we thought we could help in this area.
  - johnrob 16y ago
    (edited for clarity) Maybe notifo could act as a clearing house for all HN events. This way anyone could access new post or new comment events. In other words, my application could use notifo to subscribe to ALL HN events. HN would of course have to ping notifo every time an event happens, instead of only pinging when someone replies to a HN user with a notifo account defined. Also, if I fill out my notifo box with my notifo name on my HN profile, HN sends a one time message saying "johnrob_notifo" wants to follow "reply-johnrob" events.
  - jsankey 16y ago
    If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications. I wouldn't call the current hook into HN a good example to set, though. It's a specific hack to allow notifo access, rather than a step towards generic collaboration. Note that I don't have a problem with it - it's pragmatic and useful. But I don't see it as a step forward.
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fragmede 16y ago
It's curious you don't have a 'confirm email address' step. Do you figure abuse is not enough of a problem to warrant that step? Also, why do need both a username and an email address?
- jazzychad 16y ago
  has not been a problem (yet). MVP of this feature for now, don't want to over-engineer it in the beginning. 'username and email' because you give your username to the services that integrate notifo, and the apps have a chat feature so you can send other users messages by using their username. we need the email to reach the user for things like announcements, password resets, and now notification emails.
  - fragmede 16y ago
    Hey, it works :) Is there really a difference between asking me to write 'username' into my HN profile page, and 'username@example.com'?
fragmede 16y ago
The emails all have the same subject. The link's title should go somewhere in email subject line for those of us using Gmail.

PStamatiou 16y ago

Also - for services that have many events, we recently added event settings to the site (previously was just in the iPhone app). That means you can fine tune how, when and where notifications are delivered (including email). The HN service only has one event (Replies) but other services like Push.ly have many (@ replies, DMs, favorites, and so on). If you use push.ly for example, you can access event settings here: http://notifo.com/user/settings_events/11 http://notifo.com/user/settings_events/11 Happy Thursday, Stammy

siculars 16y ago

I signed up for your service, I know it will be useful to me. Thanks for putting it out there. The only concern I have is that it seems a bit self serving that a YC funded company gets, what seems to be, preferential treatment by having their own field in the users table. I feel you should scrape like everyone else ;)

jazzychad 16y ago
Scraping is a waste of resources for both parties involved. So is API polling to some extent. If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications. Twitter is great at this with their Streaming API. Facebook is trying, but their real-time API is a bit lacking at the moment. We're just trying to build something people want, and according to pg, he has received many requests for email notifications on HN, and we thought we could help in this area.
- johnrob 16y ago
  (edited for clarity) Maybe notifo could act as a clearing house for all HN events. This way anyone could access new post or new comment events. In other words, my application could use notifo to subscribe to ALL HN events. HN would of course have to ping notifo every time an event happens, instead of only pinging when someone replies to a HN user with a notifo account defined. Also, if I fill out my notifo box with my notifo name on my HN profile, HN sends a one time message saying "johnrob_notifo" wants to follow "reply-johnrob" events.
- jsankey 16y ago
  If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications. I wouldn't call the current hook into HN a good example to set, though. It's a specific hack to allow notifo access, rather than a step towards generic collaboration. Note that I don't have a problem with it - it's pragmatic and useful. But I don't see it as a step forward.

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fragmede 16y ago

It's curious you don't have a 'confirm email address' step. Do you figure abuse is not enough of a problem to warrant that step? Also, why do need both a username and an email address?

jazzychad 16y ago
has not been a problem (yet). MVP of this feature for now, don't want to over-engineer it in the beginning. 'username and email' because you give your username to the services that integrate notifo, and the apps have a chat feature so you can send other users messages by using their username. we need the email to reach the user for things like announcements, password resets, and now notification emails.
- fragmede 16y ago
  Hey, it works :) Is there really a difference between asking me to write 'username' into my HN profile page, and 'username@example.com'?

fragmede 16y ago

The emails all have the same subject. The link's title should go somewhere in email subject line for those of us using Gmail.