14 ms·

A thought: disposable realtime notifications for webapps

40 points by dcurtis 17y ago

matthew-wegner 17y ago
Sounds like a good use for web hooks: http://webhooks.org/ http://webhooks.org/
showerst 17y ago
In a similar vein, I'm noticing more and more social sites implement their own site-specific chat frameworks, as well as notifications (I'm looking at you facebook and gmail). We went through this once with icq/aim/msn, and it would be nice if browser vendors got together and worked out something that unified 'push' messaging before everyone implemented it separately.
- axod 17y ago
  I think competition here is pretty healthy. It's a new area, with lots of innovation. The WebSocket in HTML5 looks pretty good, hopefully that'll be implemented soon.
Sidnicious 17y ago
It's a great idea (well, a great extension of Growl's concept), but the infrastructure isn't there — not entirely. For real-time notifications to happen (and be reasonably lightweight), you need to have hooks into your monitored services. Growl works because its clients send messages to the Growl server on your machine when something interesting happens. Web services will need to have a similar mechanism for (securely) telling your notification service that "something happened." Weblogs are already most of the way there: modern blogging engines can send HTTP "pings" when new entries are posted. Apache sends its errors to a file, so it would need to be extended to post errors to your notification service. I'm rambling now, but if anyone wants to start a working group or somethin', props. It's going to need some intelligent design to take the weight of the whole internet flowing through it and to ensure that private notifications (your web server, Facebook) don't get into the wrong hands.
mcav 17y ago
This would essentially be Push RSS; you could accomplish the same thing via RSS but with polling. A push-based solution would be much cooler though, and would make more sense for notifications or events.
- mjs 17y ago
  Brad Fitzpatrick's http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ can be used for this. ("Subscribe" to a RSS/Atom feed, it does the polling for you, and gives you callbacks when new entries happen.)
- ggchappell 17y ago
  Yes, but that's the easy part, isn't it. Anyone can write a quick polling app based on RSS. The hard part is (off the top of my head ...): o Putting together a UI that people can use and will like. Notifications should be quick and easy to set up. They should be noticeable enough to work, but they should not cause problems with existing workflows. And the whole system needs to be easy for the user to understand. o If a new protocol: get sites all over to use it. If an existing one, figure out how to wrap around it nicely (extract and display the right info, etc.). o Integrate this with non-RSS stuff, like the things that Growl does.
- laut 17y ago
  I made a Ruby script that does this with RSS/Atom feed polling. It's pretty cool to get notifications in growl this way.
bobbyi 17y ago
I don't see why twitter isn't appropriate for this. The reason given is that "Twitter facilitates user <=> user communication". But he gives no explanation for why Twitter couldn't also be used for the sorts of communication he discusses.
- dcurtis 17y ago
  Twitter stores all of the messages and gives the impression of being a queue that you should read. Imagine if you inserted your facebook feed into your twitter stream. It would be so much useless junk, that you'd be unable to actually communicate with users on Twitter.
- dryicerx 17y ago
  Just because twitter CAN do it does not mean it's the most appropriate. For one the character limit kind of kills it if you want to send a really long CallBackURL.
adrianwaj 17y ago
http://imified.com http://imified.com enables web applications to be IM enabled
- ajkirwin 17y ago
  That's a bad idea, because you end up piggybacking on top of another service, unless you do something like.. individual users run their own jabber servers.
  - adrianwaj 17y ago
    You could also run a laconi.ca microblogging server, here's a list: http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/ListOfServers http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/ListOfServers and any event is sent out from one account from which all users are subscribed.
  - thwarted 17y ago
    Or you could provide a jabber server that uses your web app's authentication mechanism so users just need to add another IM account to the IM account they are already using. Or things like growl could take an jabber server as a configuration option to receive notifications from. Desktop notification is mainly just a reformatting of the UI on technologies that already exist, are in use, and are pervasive.
    - thwarted 17y ago
      Er, I meant "need to add another IM account to the IM application they are already using".
luckyland 17y ago
http://github.com/ssoper/jquery-bosh/tree/master http://github.com/ssoper/jquery-bosh/tree/master
mjs 17y ago
I thought about doing this, but Growl running on one system (e.g. desktop) can accept notifications generated by a different system (e.g. server), but unfortunately the client library is Cocoa only, so you can't compile it on your Linux host, etc. (I think this is all correct.) Has anyone "fixed" this?
- tlrobinson 17y ago
  Netgrowl is a Python library: http://the.taoofmac.com/space/Projects/netgrowl http://the.taoofmac.com/space/Projects/netgrowl Here's an example I threw together: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notifications-to-facebook/ http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notificat...
jmtulloss 17y ago
There are three platforms that are doing this totally differently: Apple, Palm, and Google. They're doing it in the mobile space, but if one of them "wins" (ie, the others start supporting their push API), I can see the browser vendors picking up on it too.
jrockway 17y ago
I use XMPP for this sort of thing.
tumult 17y ago
1. Growl allows network connections, if you enable it. There are Windows and Linux clients that implement the protocol, too. 2. Scalable "Disposable realtime notifications" from server to clients/other servers was implemented over 20 years ago, with IRC. Some green Web 2.0 guy thinks he has a great idea, is actually reinventing wheel, more news coming up at the top of the hour.
lyime 17y ago
Really interesting project I came across the other day. Juggernaut (http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/ http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/) esentially a lightweight push server. I am using it for a simple realtime web-chat client. Although you can use it for for notifications. This would be sweet.
tlrobinson 17y ago
I hacked together a Greasemonkey script + Python script that forwards Facebook feed notifications to Growl a few months ago. http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notifications-to-facebook/ http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notificat... It's rather cumbersome to setup though, and I haven't used it since the day I wrote it... A nice centralized service that would connect users and web services would be great.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
Adobe is working on something like this. It's growl for web apps. Basically, your web service pushes notifications to this app. It's exactly what you're talking about. Once I dig more info up, I'll try to post it here.
jack7890 17y ago
Superb idea. Wish I'd had it.
dangrover 17y ago
Divvyshot has a system like this -- it's pretty cool!
siong1987 17y ago
My startup is using Juggernaut[1] for this purpose. The only drawback is it only supports flash-ed browsers. And, it is not polling. [1] http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/ http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/
tezza 17y ago
Please please just use Java. It's open source and runs cross platform. Then you can get all those valuable Windows / IE users and not just Mac 5% --- From my previous post :: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552633 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552633 * Desktop Notifications - This is solved, I wrote one myself[1] Try using existing Java/Browser technology. I would suggest this: Each compatible web page has a signed applet which can also run resident on the remote machine via Webstart. If the server is not listening yet, start it. If it is listening, send it a message. The Webstart remote applet then displays the message in the GUI. My server just bound to a range of well known sockets, and the clients tried each one in turn. Try to keep it simple. I just wrote a string with a carriage return to the socket. No XML, no heaviweight protocol.

40 points by dcurtis 17y ago

Sounds like a good use for web hooks: http://webhooks.org/ http://webhooks.org/

In a similar vein, I'm noticing more and more social sites implement their own site-specific chat frameworks, as well as notifications (I'm looking at you facebook and gmail). We went through this once with icq/aim/msn, and it would be nice if browser vendors got together and worked out something that unified 'push' messaging before everyone implemented it separately.

axod 17y ago
I think competition here is pretty healthy. It's a new area, with lots of innovation. The WebSocket in HTML5 looks pretty good, hopefully that'll be implemented soon.

Sidnicious 17y ago

It's a great idea (well, a great extension of Growl's concept), but the infrastructure isn't there — not entirely. For real-time notifications to happen (and be reasonably lightweight), you need to have hooks into your monitored services. Growl works because its clients send messages to the Growl server on your machine when something interesting happens. Web services will need to have a similar mechanism for (securely) telling your notification service that "something happened." Weblogs are already most of the way there: modern blogging engines can send HTTP "pings" when new entries are posted. Apache sends its errors to a file, so it would need to be extended to post errors to your notification service. I'm rambling now, but if anyone wants to start a working group or somethin', props. It's going to need some intelligent design to take the weight of the whole internet flowing through it and to ensure that private notifications (your web server, Facebook) don't get into the wrong hands.

mcav 17y ago

This would essentially be Push RSS; you could accomplish the same thing via RSS but with polling. A push-based solution would be much cooler though, and would make more sense for notifications or events.

mjs 17y ago
Brad Fitzpatrick's http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ can be used for this. ("Subscribe" to a RSS/Atom feed, it does the polling for you, and gives you callbacks when new entries happen.)
ggchappell 17y ago
Yes, but that's the easy part, isn't it. Anyone can write a quick polling app based on RSS. The hard part is (off the top of my head ...): o Putting together a UI that people can use and will like. Notifications should be quick and easy to set up. They should be noticeable enough to work, but they should not cause problems with existing workflows. And the whole system needs to be easy for the user to understand. o If a new protocol: get sites all over to use it. If an existing one, figure out how to wrap around it nicely (extract and display the right info, etc.). o Integrate this with non-RSS stuff, like the things that Growl does.
laut 17y ago
I made a Ruby script that does this with RSS/Atom feed polling. It's pretty cool to get notifications in growl this way.

bobbyi 17y ago

I don't see why twitter isn't appropriate for this. The reason given is that "Twitter facilitates user <=> user communication". But he gives no explanation for why Twitter couldn't also be used for the sorts of communication he discusses.

dcurtis 17y ago
Twitter stores all of the messages and gives the impression of being a queue that you should read. Imagine if you inserted your facebook feed into your twitter stream. It would be so much useless junk, that you'd be unable to actually communicate with users on Twitter.
dryicerx 17y ago
Just because twitter CAN do it does not mean it's the most appropriate. For one the character limit kind of kills it if you want to send a really long CallBackURL.

adrianwaj 17y ago

http://imified.com http://imified.com enables web applications to be IM enabled

ajkirwin 17y ago
That's a bad idea, because you end up piggybacking on top of another service, unless you do something like.. individual users run their own jabber servers.
- adrianwaj 17y ago
  You could also run a laconi.ca microblogging server, here's a list: http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/ListOfServers http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/ListOfServers and any event is sent out from one account from which all users are subscribed.
- thwarted 17y ago
  Or you could provide a jabber server that uses your web app's authentication mechanism so users just need to add another IM account to the IM account they are already using. Or things like growl could take an jabber server as a configuration option to receive notifications from. Desktop notification is mainly just a reformatting of the UI on technologies that already exist, are in use, and are pervasive.
  - thwarted 17y ago
    Er, I meant "need to add another IM account to the IM application they are already using".

luckyland 17y ago

http://github.com/ssoper/jquery-bosh/tree/master http://github.com/ssoper/jquery-bosh/tree/master

mjs 17y ago

I thought about doing this, but Growl running on one system (e.g. desktop) can accept notifications generated by a different system (e.g. server), but unfortunately the client library is Cocoa only, so you can't compile it on your Linux host, etc. (I think this is all correct.) Has anyone "fixed" this?

tlrobinson 17y ago
Netgrowl is a Python library: http://the.taoofmac.com/space/Projects/netgrowl http://the.taoofmac.com/space/Projects/netgrowl Here's an example I threw together: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notifications-to-facebook/ http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notificat...

jmtulloss 17y ago

There are three platforms that are doing this totally differently: Apple, Palm, and Google. They're doing it in the mobile space, but if one of them "wins" (ie, the others start supporting their push API), I can see the browser vendors picking up on it too.

jrockway 17y ago

I use XMPP for this sort of thing.

tumult 17y ago

1. Growl allows network connections, if you enable it. There are Windows and Linux clients that implement the protocol, too. 2. Scalable "Disposable realtime notifications" from server to clients/other servers was implemented over 20 years ago, with IRC. Some green Web 2.0 guy thinks he has a great idea, is actually reinventing wheel, more news coming up at the top of the hour.

lyime 17y ago

Really interesting project I came across the other day. Juggernaut (http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/ http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/) esentially a lightweight push server. I am using it for a simple realtime web-chat client. Although you can use it for for notifications. This would be sweet.

tlrobinson 17y ago

I hacked together a Greasemonkey script + Python script that forwards Facebook feed notifications to Growl a few months ago. http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notifications-to-facebook/ http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-notificat... It's rather cumbersome to setup though, and I haven't used it since the day I wrote it... A nice centralized service that would connect users and web services would be great.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

Adobe is working on something like this. It's growl for web apps. Basically, your web service pushes notifications to this app. It's exactly what you're talking about. Once I dig more info up, I'll try to post it here.

jack7890 17y ago

Superb idea. Wish I'd had it.

dangrover 17y ago

Divvyshot has a system like this -- it's pretty cool!

siong1987 17y ago

My startup is using Juggernaut[1] for this purpose. The only drawback is it only supports flash-ed browsers. And, it is not polling. [1] http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/ http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/

tezza 17y ago

Please please just use Java. It's open source and runs cross platform. Then you can get all those valuable Windows / IE users and not just Mac 5% --- From my previous post :: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552633 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552633 * Desktop Notifications - This is solved, I wrote one myself[1] Try using existing Java/Browser technology. I would suggest this: Each compatible web page has a signed applet which can also run resident on the remote machine via Webstart. If the server is not listening yet, start it. If it is listening, send it a message. The Webstart remote applet then displays the message in the GUI. My server just bound to a range of well known sockets, and the clients tried each one in turn. Try to keep it simple. I just wrote a string with a carriage return to the socket. No XML, no heaviweight protocol.