Get email notifications of HN replies with Notifo (YC W10) | Hacker News Reader

Get email notifications of HN replies with Notifo (YC W10)

notifo.com

69 pointsjazzychad33 comments

Hi HN. We are testing out a new feature on Notifo: email notifications. We've setup a special landing page for you to play with it.

Once you enable the email notifications, you'll be emailed anytime someone replies to one of your comments on an HN thread, so you won't have to sit on HN all day frantically refreshing the page :)

Also, if you want updates for your HN Karma points, I am using another site called Femtoo - http://femtoo.com/ - (which also supports Notifo) that will check my karma every so often and notify me when it changes.

Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback! Also feel free to use this thread as a reply playground to test out the new emails.

Hopefully these email notifications will also help Android and BB users that have push email, while we are still working away at native clients; but of course this feature works for anyone that has an email account :)

Also - for services that have many events, we recently added event settings to the site (previously was just in the iPhone app). That means you can fine tune how, when and where notifications are delivered (including email).

The HN service only has one event (Replies) but other services like Push.ly have many (@ replies, DMs, favorites, and so on). If you use push.ly for example, you can access event settings here: http://notifo.com/user/settings_events/11

Happy Thursday, Stammy

I signed up for your service, I know it will be useful to me. Thanks for putting it out there. The only concern I have is that it seems a bit self serving that a YC funded company gets, what seems to be, preferential treatment by having their own field in the users table. I feel you should scrape like everyone else ;)

Scraping is a waste of resources for both parties involved. So is API polling to some extent. If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications. Twitter is great at this with their Streaming API. Facebook is trying, but their real-time API is a bit lacking at the moment.

We're just trying to build something people want, and according to pg, he has received many requests for email notifications on HN, and we thought we could help in this area.

(edited for clarity)

Maybe notifo could act as a clearing house for all HN events. This way anyone could access new post or new comment events.

In other words, my application could use notifo to subscribe to ALL HN events.

HN would of course have to ping notifo every time an event happens, instead of only pinging when someone replies to a HN user with a notifo account defined.

Also, if I fill out my notifo box with my notifo name on my HN profile, HN sends a one time message saying "johnrob_notifo" wants to follow "reply-johnrob" events.

If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications.

I wouldn't call the current hook into HN a good example to set, though. It's a specific hack to allow notifo access, rather than a step towards generic collaboration.

Note that I don't have a problem with it - it's pragmatic and useful. But I don't see it as a step forward.

It's curious you don't have a 'confirm email address' step. Do you figure abuse is not enough of a problem to warrant that step?

Also, why do need both a username and an email address?

has not been a problem (yet). MVP of this feature for now, don't want to over-engineer it in the beginning.

'username and email' because you give your username to the services that integrate notifo, and the apps have a chat feature so you can send other users messages by using their username. we need the email to reach the user for things like announcements, password resets, and now notification emails.

Hey, it works :)

Is there really a difference between asking me to write 'username' into my HN profile page, and 'username@example.com'?

The emails all have the same subject. The link's title should go somewhere in email subject line for those of us using Gmail.

What's up with the grainy font on your website? I'm no designer but that's pretty distracting and lowers the perceived value of your application.

Are you in Windows? We're using Typekit to load some fonts and some setups aren't particularly good at rendering fonts. :/

Some fonts are also specially designed to render under specific font rendering engines (and will look crappy elsewhere, or just not as good).

Yeah, I'm using Windows 7/Chrome.

I agree 100%.

When I see horridly aliased fonts like that, I always assume it's some kind of Apple thing that just doesn't look right elsewhere.

Is that it?

http://imgur.com/69eTV.png

I use the latest Chrome on Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

I think I might just disable Typekit for Windows. Please hold, researching.

Something that's helped us: adding "text-shadow:0 1px 1px #FFF;". Particularly useful with webkit. Adding the drop shadow ratchets up the perceived anti-aliasing, even if the text is on top of a white background.

Welcome to the world of crappy font rendering for the majority of browsers. Even with @font-face in the wild, it's going to be years before we finally see properly rendered fonts for our end-users.

It looks OK in Firefox on Ubuntu:

http://imgur.com/wYEI8.png (760K)

This was exactly what I first thought. To make things worse, I hate Apple, and so I immediately associated your product with all the problems Apple has caused me.

This is a pretty genius way to get members of a messageboard/site to use your service.

One minor critique: the instructions say "Once you have subscribed to HN alerts, go to the Hacker News Service Settings page and make sure that Send Email Notifications is checked", but I do not see any "Send Email Notifications" checkbox on the page linked to.

Have you enabled Receive Email Notifications under the Advanced Settings? http://notifo.com/user/settings/advanced - this will display the email checkboxes on the service settings pages.

Oops! Apparently I skipped step #2 :)

Thank you. I asked for this in the past: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1194757

It would be cool to integrate notifo with grawlnotify for mac users. This way we can see the notification directly on the screen and avoid polluting our inboxes.

Better yet, http://notifo.com/desktop - NotifoGrowl does exactly this.

ah, wasn't aware of that. Thanks!

Congrats Jazzy & Stammy!

Hi, nice website ! Btw there is also http://nasr.ath.cx for that.

Would love to see a native Blackberry app, but have signed up for the email notifications :)

I love your service.

Any plans for a WP7 native client and/or a NotifoGrowl Windows app?

great feature guys, i was waiting for email notifications.

Isn't this incest?

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