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Notifications themselves aren't a problem, it's the implementation that is, especially "dumb" notifications. A dumb notification is one that gets sent to you fr

Notifications themselves aren't a problem, it's the implementation that is, especially "dumb" notifications. A dumb notification is one that gets sent to you from an app that is unaware of the context of the notification. Apps need to make notifications smart by first adding options for what kind and how often they pop up. Facebook appeased me some time ago but now is back to annoying me. I used to get emails for every little thing that happened on Facebook then I was allowed to set it so I got one consolidated email every so often. Great. Now they end up buzzing my phone with every little comment or Like. That's annoying. If they could let me set it so that I was notified once per post of comments or maybe one notification after X number of actions that would normally trigger a notification that would be awesome but having my pocket buzz every two seconds sucks. My girlfriend once commented on everything she could on my wall for more than 20 minutes and my phone was literally buzzing the entire time. I had to call to tell her to quit commenting. She burst out laughing because she knew all the notifications would annoy me. It was a super frustrating joke. As someone who isn't very social to begin with, an overload of notifications can actually be overwhelming and make me less engaged instead of more engaged. Smart use of notifications gets me using your service. Buffer does this right. I get, at most, 2 notifications if I have an empty buffer and it gets me adding more. Mint gives me 2 notifications a week: one if a bank account goes over or under a certain threshold and another with a summary of my finances at the end of the week. That's great. Twitter, Facebook, Livingsocial, Groupon.. They're all annoying. I guess the point is that "dumb" notifications are like getting a cold call from someone who hasn't done research about you, tries to sell you something you wouldn't ever want and mispronounces your name on top of it. Smart notifications are like good friends that call you up every so often just to see how you're doing and to see if maybe you want to make plans for later.

j45 15y ago
Smart Notifications, all the way. :)
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  Is that even a thing? Smart Notifications? It should be. There are apps like Brizzly to help you tune out some of the noise from Facebook and/or Twitter but it does nothing for notifications. Wouldn't it be great if someone (someone else, of course i won't do it haha) made an app that intercepted those notifications and made them smart and gave you more control over them. Or maybe someone could just develop the technology and sell it to these companies. I'm sure they could do it themselves but if they're not on it yet why not make they're lives easier? Maybe it could work by giving these services like Facebook an email address like you@SmartNotifications.com and then they filter them and send them to your real inbox in a smart way. And for SMS maybe use something like Twilio or AmazonSNS and give the Facebook type app a unique number that directs all notifications to the SmartNotifications app then it filters them for you and forwards them in a smart way to your mobile device. Now, for app notifications I'm not sure how that would work as I can't think of a way for a third party to intercept that type of thing so maybe you'd just have to turn notifications off on your phone and rely on SmartNotification email and SMS alerts. But the article makes a good point about all these websites having a vested interest in annoying you. Surely google and Facebook could implement this and I find it hard to believe that they haven't done it because they just haven't gotten around to it. It would make sense that they would want to avoid this feature so that kind of rules out hoping to build this sort of thing and selling it to them. We're left with circumventing the system and doing it without their approval potentially making anyone who does this an enemy to web apps and a friend to the users. Unfortunately the apps will probably have more power and make it difficult to operate. But we can all still dream.
  - j45 15y ago
    Smart Notifications = One app I'd pay for any day.

j45 15y ago

Smart Notifications, all the way. :)

billpatrianakos 15y ago
Is that even a thing? Smart Notifications? It should be. There are apps like Brizzly to help you tune out some of the noise from Facebook and/or Twitter but it does nothing for notifications. Wouldn't it be great if someone (someone else, of course i won't do it haha) made an app that intercepted those notifications and made them smart and gave you more control over them. Or maybe someone could just develop the technology and sell it to these companies. I'm sure they could do it themselves but if they're not on it yet why not make they're lives easier? Maybe it could work by giving these services like Facebook an email address like you@SmartNotifications.com and then they filter them and send them to your real inbox in a smart way. And for SMS maybe use something like Twilio or AmazonSNS and give the Facebook type app a unique number that directs all notifications to the SmartNotifications app then it filters them for you and forwards them in a smart way to your mobile device. Now, for app notifications I'm not sure how that would work as I can't think of a way for a third party to intercept that type of thing so maybe you'd just have to turn notifications off on your phone and rely on SmartNotification email and SMS alerts. But the article makes a good point about all these websites having a vested interest in annoying you. Surely google and Facebook could implement this and I find it hard to believe that they haven't done it because they just haven't gotten around to it. It would make sense that they would want to avoid this feature so that kind of rules out hoping to build this sort of thing and selling it to them. We're left with circumventing the system and doing it without their approval potentially making anyone who does this an enemy to web apps and a friend to the users. Unfortunately the apps will probably have more power and make it difficult to operate. But we can all still dream.
- j45 15y ago
  Smart Notifications = One app I'd pay for any day.