We got a little too excited about our C# library, we announced it before we annouced our API release … so without further adieu, here’s the announcement for our API release:
notify.me is releasing the first phase of our developer API. The API enables content publishers to deliver notifications into a notify.me customer’s notification stream. In doing so content publishers can reach out to their user base through a variety of communication mediums which currently include instant messenger, email, text messages and a cross platform desktop application in real time. With the use of the notify.me API, content publishers can now effortlessly get their users to subscribe to real time notifications through the notify.me service, as a result content publishers can drive users to their site when new content is published.
Currently the majority of websites support the RSS/Atom standards for publishing content, while these standards provide a step in the right direction for publishing data, they come with some limitations, most notably:
- RSS/Atom rely on structuring the data in the XML, a fairly common problem that content publishers face is to consistantly publish valid XML data. Everybody makes misakes even giants like google and craiglist publish invalid XML feeds from time to time.
- Once an RSS feed is published and users are subscribed to the the source URL it can not be changed. If it is changed users will no longer receive updates, resulting in dead RSS feeds, this results in a horrible user experience which in turn results in the loss of users for content publishers.
- RSS feeds rely on content ingestors such as RSS readers to constant poll sites for updates.
Simply put, RSS is hard to get right. The initial feature set of the API addresses the above problems that content publishers currently experience. With the notify.me API, content publishers can rest assured that their data is formatted correctly since notify.me verifies the data and returns a success or failure when content is published, second content publishers need not worry about dead links, since users are subscribed to an API source content publishers are free to change their URLs without the fear of lossing their customers, finally the API allows content publishers to push notifications allowing their users to get instant updates within seconds of an article being published rather than relying of being polled for updates.
The notify.me application is built on a scalable real time notification engine that processes incoming messages from sources, and not only routes them to a specific user, but it filters them according to a user’s preference and routes them to a user’s destination of choice. The API provides an elegant interface that takes the guess work out of knowing whether a content publisher succeeded in delivering a notification to a user, once the API returns a success publishers can rest assured that the message will reach the intended audience.
We believe the API will really entice sites that are looking to provide a value add to their customer’s experience in which being a first responder makes a difference. Take for example woot.com, they have a limited inventory of items for which users compete, or perhaps stackoverflow.com for which you have you gain a competitive advantage by replying first. Not only does the API address the first responder issue, but it also guarantees the delivery of a message from a content publisher to an end user. We also expect to get some great feedback and suggestions from our user base that have inspired us in the past, so we’re really excited to open up a public inferface for people to build and integrate applications with.
Our company’s focus in the near term will be to complete the implementation of a full featured API allowing both content publishers and customers complete control over their notify.me experience. To see the complete road map for the API, please visit: http://wiki.notify.me/API/REST_API/Roadmap_Draft
Cheers,
-Hani Anani
We’re quite excited to announce the release of the first version of the notify.me API C# library. With this release it should be a snap for C# developers to integrate with our service to deliver real time notifications. We’re just getting warmed up on the API front, we really think this is the way to go and allows for tons of creative applications to be built on top of our platform. So, get all the details and grab a copy of the C# library from here and take it for a spin.
Cheers,
Team notify.me
PS. We’re on twitter http://twitter.com/notifyme
So, the notify.me toolbar has been live for a couple of weeks now, and it’s made some waves, some people dig it as evidenced at hyveup.tv and others .. well, let’s just say weren’t too fond of it. Thanks for you input, we’ve listened and we thought we’d share our vision of the tool bar and let you know how to zap the toolbar if you find it to be pesky. Also, read on if you’d like to help get Seesmic desktop integration with notify.me.
The goal of the tool bar was to provide an interface to manage a source’s setting without having to navigate back to the source listing page. So we pulled all the functionality from the source listing page which includes destination routing, key word filtering and the ability to unsubscribe from a source and added it to the toolbar. Once we tested this functionality out, one of our team members wanted a way to share the link they were currently viewing with their friends through their social networks so we integrated ping.fm and the addthis functionality to the toolbar to make sharing a snap. You might have noticed the modular design of the bar, allowing us to add new functionality … if you’ve got ideas on what we can add to make it more useful, let us know on our forums http://getsatisfaction.com/notifyme
If the toolbar is bugging you and just doesn’t feel right, you can disable it from the settings page by visiting http://notify.me/user/account/edit and checking off the enable toolbar option towards the bottom of the page (be sure to click save account settings for it to take effect)
So the folks over at seesmic have a cool cross platform desktop application which you can learn more about at http://desktop.seesmic.com/. We’ve started a dialogue with Loic over at Seesmic to bring notify.me integration to their desktop client and it sounds like they’re interested but they’re pretty slammed for time.
To demonstrate user interest in this feature we figured we’d start a vote on their forum, if you’d like to see notify.me integrated into Seesmic desktop… If you can spare a second and think this is valuable cast a vote here.
Cheers,
Team notify.me
We’ve been working on some tasty new features over the past couple of months at notify.me, and we’ve just released a few to whet your appetite. First off, we’ve been paying close attention to all your feedback posted on our forum over at http://getsatisfaction.com/notifyme, ton’s of fixes have been made, here are some feature requests that we’ve deployed (keep the feedback coming, we love it!):
- You can now edit source names by clicking on that pencil icon
on the source listing page
- You can now add sources directly from your instant messenger client. Simply paste in the URL of the website you’d like to follow through the notify.me service and it will added to your source list.
- Support for lots of new mobile phone carriers
On another front we’ve partnered up with the folks over at Ping.fm [http://ping.fm] and 
integrated their service as a destination. So, not only can you route messages to a mobile phone, instant messenger, email and desktop application but you can also route them to all your social networks such as twitter, facebook, linkedin and brightkite through Ping.fm. Think of notify.me as your personal real time super syndicate. We were so excited about this feature that we’ve coined a new term for it over here.
notifipingation: to automatically blast updates to all social networks in real time with the use of the notify.me and ping.fm web service
Read more on how to start notifipinging here http://wiki.notify.me/How_do_I%3f/setup_ping.fm_as_a_destination, also check out the blog post over at Ping.fm http://ping.fm/blog/skype-intl-sms-hootsuite-and-notify-me/
Finally, here’s a link to the official press release
Happy notifipingation,
Team notify.me
After a two week soft-launch I would like to announce the initial public release of the notify.me desktop application. Please note this is an early release of the desktop application, we’ve built in an auto update feature that will check for updates every time you relaunch the application. Also, we’re really excited about the ninja mode notification feature which allows you to minimize the desktop application and get a notification when new content is published to your notification stream. Below is a screen shot of ninja mode in action.
A few things to help you get started:
1. User experience is extremely valuable to us, please post your feedback to our feedback forum at http://getsatisfaction.com/notifyme
2. Any existing sources that you have in your account need to have the desktop application toggled as a destination (just like sms, email and IM) from the source listing page at: http://notify.me/user/source/list
3. Any new sources that you add will automatically have the application defaulted as a destination
4. Get the application from: http://notify.me/user/destination
5. If you’re using Mac OS X spaces and want to receive ninja mode notifications on all you spaces (not just the one you have minimized), we’ve put together a write up on the wiki on how to do that here.
Cheers,
Team notify.me
We’ve released a couple of big features and responded to numerous bugs:
- Our largest new feature is our alltop.com integration. notify.me makes use of alltop.com’s excellent feed directory to make it easier for people to add topics they are interested in. If you like to cook but don’t know of any sites/feeds to add. Just go to our source topic page and click on ‘Living’ and then on ‘Food’ and we will add the best information sources to your notify.me source list.
- Email ingestion will now split out the body and include it through the notification stream. What? I can send email to notify.me and it will take the email and insert it into the message stream. Yes you can even though it is kinda of a hidden feature, everyone has an email account formated as: username@notify.me We need to add an information page describing this in more detail (TODO).
- Emails notifications are now a lot more useful. They include the feed title in the subject and the first ~150 characters of the feed content in the body of the email. I know the new format breaks a lot of hacks people where doing to update the ping.fm account via email delivery. However, we have been talking to our friends at ping.fm and hope to have a direct partnership formed soon that will allow for a lot closer and direct integration.
- Messages are now formatted using the the feed’s title not their domain (for IM and Email notifications). Some people love this others do not. We plan on defaulting to title but allow the user to change the title (TODO).
Bugs:
- Fixed many internationalization bugs. Users should now be able to view proper international characters sets in emails and IM notifications (we are still working on SMS, might work for some carries).
- Filtering now works a lot better, a bit more i18n work to do here.
- Message format have been updated
- Increased the number of new feeds we can monitor
- Added new SMS provider. We only support smtp gateways at this point. So keep them coming, email to info@getorganyzd.com, or visit our customer service page.
- Better all around scalability and stability
Upcoming major features:
- We hope to get an alpha of our desktop app out very soon. I’ve been saying this each week for two weeks now. But I think its coming really really soon ;)
- We soon will soon complete a partnership with page2rss.com which will allow us to create notifications from websites that do not have external feeds available. We will work with the entire web.
-
OpenID / Facebook Connect/ Google Connect… it’s coming, I promise.
- Couple other surprises.
Thank you for all your support and comments and helping make notify.me a better service. Any comments, questions, complaints please tell use.
Jason Wieland
CEO - notify.me
It’s great to see so many new users. I hope you find our service useful.
Please let us know about things that work and things that don’t via our customer service tool. We really try to address issues right away.
notify.me recently moved to a tinyurl like link in notifications. This will allow us to add notification links to sms, which was a big complaint. However, other people have commented that they like to view the original link for information purposes in their IM clients. We are working out a solution, please bear with us for a couple weeks.
For the past few days we had some issues with the pubsub handshake with gtalk users. This was resolved a couple hours ago. You should now be able to recieve notifications. Let us know about other issues.
The people from New Media Rights have produced this superb video demonstrating what is possible with notify.me
http://www.vimeo.com/1943541
Yesterday highscalability posted a great article about our technology. If you are interested in how this all works and how it is possible to get notifications so quickly, check it out.
Two big things to talk about for release G.
First, we’ve completed the much requested filtering feature. User can now add a feed and filter their notifications based on keywords.
Maybe you love using techbargains to find those killer deals. But you’re only shopping for monitors and are hesitant to add techbargains because of the sheer daily onslaught of notifications.
Fear no longer, you can add the feed with confidence and recieve only the notifications that match your keywords. Simply go to notify.me, add the source, and click on ‘filter’ by the newly added feed. From there you can add keywords that must be in the feed or you can add keywords that will block a feed is matched.
So lets say you are looking for a television but don’t want a projection tv. You can add
- Add a site like techbargains or dailydeals
- click on filtering add an “include” filter for television
- click on filtering add an “exclude” filter for projection
And there you go.
Release G was a large architectural change. We’ve moved our high load process off to Amazon Web Servers (AWS) making use of ec2, s3, sdb. We ran into some issues and as a result you were probably received duplicate notifications.
All is now well and are positioned to handle long term growth. We apologize for any inconvenience.
