notify.me blog

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