Notifo (YC W10) Android Client - Beta signup | Hacker News Reader

Notifo (YC W10) Android Client - Beta signup

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90 pointsjazzychad27 comments

I love Notifo - Ive built two 'services' and one project for it. Its one of those things that everybody wants, if only you could explain to them what the heck it is. I'm glad they are coming out with an android client. And (shamless plug) check out my Notifo project- http://1pix.me

Not to knock your project, but why exactly would anybody want to get a notification every single time their website is viewed? I could see that becoming extremely annoying, and it is in no way beneficial for statistics, so what's the value proposition? I apologize if this came across as harsh, but I honestly can't think of a purpose.

No problem, It's not an easy thing to explain. I have a site that I built as a resume to apply for a position at one specific company, and I blocked search engines. I want to be notified every single time the site is viewed, since there's a very small, specific group of people who will visit it.

You could also put one of these on the 'thank you' page if you're selling something, to be notified when people make a purchase, or on a specific type of error page.

Or you could put this in an HTML email to be notified when people open the email (although many mail clients block this).

It's certainly not something you'd want to put on the front page of news.ycombinator.com. It's intended for much lower traffic, but high value locations. Plus, it's free and it only took a day to build, and it was fun :)

you should put some of that on the webpage. i had no idea what it was until reading your explanation.

I wonder what the discovery mechanism for new services is supposed to be - i.e. how could I know about your service without reading your comment here on HN? They don't seem to include all projects there are on their services page (which looks rather empty to me for such an interesting project).

It's tough for sure. I did email them and they promised to put me on their project page. Its in their best interest to promote projects that are using their service.

Finally.

I looked at Notifo a few times, but with no Android app I didn't see how it would be useful to me so I put it back on a "check back later" list.

Now this exists I can start figuring out what it can do for me. Hope I get on the beta.

Umm, what is Notifo, and why would I want to beta test it?

From their website:

    Notifo is a free and powerful way to receive super-fast notifications 
    of the things you care about, straight to your mobile phones and computers.[1]

[1] http://notifo.com/

Sounds a lot like Google Alerts except you can pick the sources and choose how to receive the notifications. Is that accurate?

It's a push notification platform for anything you can build it into. Load up your HN profile and there's a Notifo box to get notified when someone responds to your comment. Apps they put together like Push.ly to notify you when someone DMs/RTs/Mentions you on Twitter (note: they released this before twitter added the functionality to their apps).

My friend uses it on a site for his sales/signup process, when a transaction goes through he knows immediately.

One of the plugins I use the most is their Chrome to Notifo plugin for Google Chrome. If I'm on a page I can hit the button and it will push the page URL to my phone.

Interesting. Are sites such as http://pusherapp.com and other hosted comet/websocket/push services basically their competitors?

Same space, different offering. If you want _mobile_ push notifications, you need a mobile app in the App Store/Android Market that can hook up to APNS/C2DM, et cetera. Notifo does that.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=notifo

This is getting old very, very fast.

Why couldn't Chad (who posted this) just have written a little summary of the company below the link? Even better, he could have added it to the form. This would leave the potential beta testers out of confusion and wouldn't require useless comments like yours to have to be posted.

Is that so hard?

[edit: I'm getting downvoted for this. Why? Could someone please post a reason why jraines' comment was useful in anyway?]

sigh Fine, I'll bite. I posted that comment for the same reason you posted yours: to discourage a type of comment I consider useless. There's nothing lazier, especially in a forum for hackers, than "what is this and why should I care?!". IMO the right attitude is "wow, something I have never heard of is at the top HN? Awesome, let me take 30 effing seconds to learn about something new that my peers consider important or cool". Then, if you still have questions, ask away, to the benefit of the forum.

Thanks for writing back. I'm sorry if my comment came across as rude, as I really did not intend it to be that way. However, while I also did find mian2zi3's considerably useless, he probably speaks for a lot of people with the same question. lmgtfy is great for the most part. But in this case, the original poster of the link could have been a little more professional and saved the potential beta testers the time to look into why they would want to beta test for the site.

  the original poster of the link could have been a little    
  more professional and saved the potential beta testers 
  the time to look into why they would want to beta test 
  for the site.

To be fair Chad was a bit rushed while submitting this; just running out the door to pick me up as we were cutting it close for a drive down to Mountain View to meet with pg.

This is great news! Our startup http://www.sescout.com has been using notify to alert users of changes in their search engine ranking positions for some time now.

Truly a brilliant service. We will let our users know that you are accepting beta testers for the Android version!

How is this different from Urban Airship?

http://urbanairship.com/

UA requires you to have your own mobile app. Notifo serves the rest of the crowd that doesn't have their own mobile app. Just use our iPhone/Android clients and use our API to send notifications.

Deleted comment

I am constantly amazed that people on news.ycombinator.com are surprised that YC companies get lots of votes. There are a lot of people here that are YC fans and are more likely to upvote something if it's about a YC company.

And I'm one of them. I don't just upvote anything about any YC company, but I'm a huge fan of Notifo, Heroku, Dropbox, Posterous, and a bunch more.

I'd be very surprised if the "preferential treatment" that you claim YC companies receive is in code, rather than in the minds of many of the voters.

Also, if you look at any recent thread about Notifo, you'll see some comment along the lines of "Notifo is great ... but it'll be a lot greater when we get an Android client." There's been a lot of people waiting for this.

Could be also that its a beta signup and people are really interested in the android client.

Pretty sure Notifo is just Chad and Paul, but given Paul's popularity this really isn't that odd. Probably just the result of an innocent, "Hey dude upvote my HN submission will ya" text or two.

Nice. I've been eagerly waiting for Notifo for Android.

Now I'm just waiting on the Linux client.

Whaat, I signed up for the beta on the site ages ago, when it first launched. I demand to be included :(

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