notify.me blog

Email/Text is saved, notify.me moving to subscription

Today is the day we were supposed to terminate email and text notification delivery. After the feedback we received, we decided to see if we could avoid shuttering those parts of the service and I’m happy to report that we decided that we will continue to support email and text delivery.  The overall response to the last weeks blog post was that you would rather pay than to have us be forced to remove features.  To that end, notify.me is putting together a subscription model.  

It will be inexpensive (under $10/m) and we will offer a special promotion for all current customers, as a thanks for the years of support.  We are planning to:

• keep all the existing functionality
• offer better delivery times by moving to pubsubhubbub
• include better integration for popular feeds
• continue to be 100% ad-free

Over the next month we will prepare the subscription service with plans to launch it in late August.  

A common question is bound to be if notify.me would offer a free or ad supported version of the service.  After looking at the alternatives, we have decided against this.  Offering a free version of the site would take too many resources away from paying members.  Also over the past two years we have not found an ad-supported model that we’re comfortable with.

Thank you,

notify.me

notify.me removes email/sms delivery and other updates

This is our first post in nearly a year.  We’ve been busy behind the scenes, but didn’t have anything that had a visible impact on our users.  If you do not care about the last years of events skip down to the last couple paragraphs to find out what changes we are making to notify.me service.

A bit of history.  

From May of 2009 we put notify.me on autopilot and started working on extending the service into a b2b product, code named firengin.  firengin hooks our notification engine into intranet monitoring products (think nagios and the likes) and be able to intelligently route/escalate notifications to operations teams.  We added  bi-directional communication so a team of people can effectively chat about a series of monitoring alerts with an integrated event stream.  Everything is tagged, archived and indexed for simple search.  We added features to automate post-mortem reports, markup/tag portions of the conversation to build a knowledge base, and import into the wiki for reference later.  We had discussions with a couple high profile companies and established that there was a market.

After progressing to the 60-70% mark we decided that it would be best to scuttle firengin and shut down the venture. Here is why:

• I spent 50% of my available time traveling to SF/SJ (we’re based in San Diego) talking/working with venture and angels.  Raising money is a pain.  Unless your have an extremely hot web property or a proven VC track record its difficult to break in. Spending a large amount of time on things that do not directly involve your product is distracting, harmful and counter productive.  I’m 100% sure that my next venture will be structured to get to critical mass before requiring external funding.
• We changed focus to the B2B model a year into starting the company.  The entire team had already been working for quite a while without a paycheck.  As long you continue to make visible progress it’s easy to motivate a team — Favorable customer/tech blog reviews are great to keep the spirits and productivity high.  Switching focus to a product that needs 6-9 months of development before it can be publicly announced had devastating effects on motivation.
• Selling into IT is long sales cycle.  While the overall US yearly budget for IT spending is quite large ~200-250 billion it has been decreasing for the past 5 years.  Especially in a recession, selling new tech into the IT space was hard work.  The problem is not going from 1000 sales to 10,000 sales, its getting the first 100 customers. Those first 100 customers need to take a big leap of faith by making the investment to integrate the new service into their technology while paying a premium for service.  It is a tough, long sell.

Why did we decide not to just concentrate on notify.me?  

It only took a couple months to see that baseline notify.me would be a niche service.  There is nothing wrong with the niche server unless your revenue plan dictates that you need an extensive user base.  Niche services need to deliver a large value proposition.

Fast forwarding to today, notify.me has seen continued and steady growth.  Here are a couple stats I gather up yesterday.

Notifications delivered per day:

• IM 502k
• Email 68K
• SMS 32k

Amount notifications clicks per day: 61k

notify.me has been supported mainly by myself http://twitter.com/mp3tricord and sdether http://twitter.com/sdether.  We’ve used a couple partners to help support the service which brings me to the crux of this posting.  A long time ago I made a promise to myself I would never manage another qmail/sendmail server.  So we used an outside company to deliver our 100k email/sms messages.  We ended up choosing fastmail.fm because they one of the best email services on the net.  Rob Mueller runs a stellar operation and has helped notify.me tremendously.  However fastmail’s email service was never meant to be used as a SMTP gateway and after the sale to Opera (congrats guys on that) it looks like they are politely requesting us to stop by the end of the month.  So we are planning to do just that. 

So what does mean for our users?

The email situation left me with three choices.

1. Switch to another email company that specialized in SMTP delivery.  There are a couple http://aweber.com http://postmarkapp.com/ http://www.socketlabs.com/ http://sendgrid.com/
2. Run my own SMTP mail server (maybe postfix this time around)
3. Stop sending emails/sms

To send about 3 million emails a month through the cheapest company listed in #1 is about $2k/m, too much for my budget.

Running my own SMTP server is breaking a long standing promise I made to myself.  Life is just too short to manage your own mail service.

Which leads us to discontinuing email and sms delivery.  When I started notify.me the idea was to deliver all notification via Instant Messenger services.  It was the only way to guarantee a timely delivery. Our IM service uses Xmpp/Jabber because its federated nature meant the extensive base of Xmpp accounts out there could plug straight in.

Unfortunately, even people that have Xmpp accounts often do not even know they have one. If you have a gmail or facebook account, you have an Xmpp account. In addition every user that signs up gets a <username>@notify.me account that can be used via many clients, such as Pidgin, Adium, Trillian, etc. There are also Xmpp clients for most smartphones, which unlike SMS does not incur a service charge.

Our plan is to stop email and sms delivery of notifications on July 27th.  After that the only way to receive notifications will be over IM.  We do apologize to all the people that rely on email/sms delivery.  If you don’t want to use your IM account one other possible solution is to move your email notifications over to feedburner.

Email was meant to get users unfamiliar with IM to use the product and then migrate them over.  Unfortunately we did a poor job communicating how to make the transition and we apologize for the rather abrupt 1 week transition that email and sms are now left with.

notify.me API release

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

Post real time notifications with C#

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

notify.me toolbar update & seesmic integration support

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

Massive notify.me release + Ping.fm support

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!):

1. You can now edit source names by clicking on that pencil icon  on the source listing page
2. 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.
3. 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

notify.me releases cross platform desktop application

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

Release 23 - Alltop integration, Bug Fixes, and Email Enhancements

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

Welcome Lifehacker, Delicious and other users

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