Startup Update: Notifo iPhone App v2, More | Hacker News Reader

Startup Update: Notifo iPhone App v2, More

paulstamatiou.com

63 pointsPStamatiou19 comments

Our other big announcement today is that Notifo/Pushly have partnered with Twitter to have access to their new Site Stream API - http://blog.notifo.com/pushly-partners-with-twitter-site-str...

+ youtube app walkthrough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW5hp3aoF9M

+ updated Chrome extension (Chrome updated to 6.0+ today and we use new context menu APIs it now supports): https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lgffhepmapgeepjn...

Great job guys, and excellent walkthrough Paul.

Targetting Whatsapp and ping (chat) is a clever hack. A lot of my friends use it as a free alternative to texting, and i'll be sure to tell them to start using Notifo for that...As soon as it displays them as easily as whatapp does.*

I've found sending a message to twitter to be completely unintuitive though. I had to send something to 'twitter', typing it out without any sort of hint that I was doing it correctly. Then minutes later, I get a Notifo message that it tweeted. Which I just did myself, via the same device.

*it reads your phone's addressbook and displays all contacts that also have whatsapp, probably based on telephone number

> phone's addressbook and displays all contacts that also have whatsapp, probably based on telephone number

We've been chatting internally about such an onboarding process.

> I've found sending a message to twitter to be completely unintuitive though

It's more of a proof-of-concept for anyone to built bots. We'll be updating the API documentation for that and opening the doors. We know that the twitter bot implementation definitely hacky and not quite sure why anyone would use it over a full-blown twitter client. Other proof-of-concept bots: dicebot (send "help" or hi), notifo (send "temp sf" or help), jill (not run by us, not sure if still up), et cetera

Thanks for the feedback!

> not quite sure why anyone would use it over a full-blown twitter client.

I use notifo + push.ly to receive message when someone mentions me. As I have a 3G, switching over to the twitter app is slow and cumbersome, so replying-in-notifo is a good usecase :)

Well there ya go. ;) We enabled URL schemes in this version so that means we can add a "Notifo" app addition to Push.ly if someone wants to use that as their primary so when they tap a pushly notification it can switch to the convo tab and make a new msg with the twitter bot/msg already filled out ready for reply

P.S. - I got notifo'd of your reply, both on my iphone and OS X with our desktop app haha

Nice work guys. I'm really impressed with the App updates today and the website update. One thing I was surprised by was that you don't have an option for "Allow Notifo to send me information about service updates and new features" and then have this announcement out to peoples devices. The other thing is that if you're going to use Paul's blog for announcements then it would really pay to have a mobile friendly version of the blog given your target market.

We would love to do notifications about updates, new features, etc, but that is against the Apple APNS terms... so we can't. We can, however, add a 'nag box' inside the app that will check with the server about new version numbers and then tell the user to update (that has been added to this new version, so it won't be seen until the next version).

Agree about the mobile version of Stammy's blog. I'll keep nagging him about that too :)

I guess that makes sense, I would be pretty annoyed if Facebook sent me a notification every time they roll out some random new feature.

I like the idea of bots, but I don't see a lot of consumer grade users using it. Seems more like a toy for the nerds amongst us, although I am sorely tempted to whip up an Eliza bot for notifo. That said, I also wanted to modify a z-code interpreter to allow people to play infocom games over twitter.

Fine fine, I'll install a mobile theme or something later today. ;)

Whoa, awesome work guys. I've been using Notifo as a quasi bot for a telepresence robot my friend and I have been building. The new features are very much welcomed. Thanks!

> telepresence robot my friend and I have been building

Whoa that sounds interesting - any details you can share?

Congrats, guys. This is excellent sauce.

Thanks for giving us some fantastic user feedback the last few months!

will your android client be using c2dm or just doing constant polling?

c2dm where available (2.2+), polling as fallback for older versions unfortunately. we are as anti-polling as you can get and will only do it out of pure necessity.

excellent. anxiously awaiting your android release!

Excited about Notifo, downloaded the app and loving it!

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