Announcing BlogFire - new from Notifo (YC W10) | Hacker News Reader

Announcing BlogFire - new from Notifo (YC W10)

blog.jazzychad.net

64 pointsjazzychad25 comments

The last thing I want is for TechCrunch to be able to push to me.

That said, I think this is an excellent way of making RSS accessible to lots of non-techies, especially those who use an iPhone/iPad more than a computer. How do you plan on getting this in front of people who don't already use an RSS reader?

To each his own :) I go back and forth on turning TC on and off. The nice thing about BlogFire is that you can subscribe to as many feeds as you want in the app and enable/disable notifications on a per-feed basis. Then you can just use the app as a feed reader for the others.

There are a couple of ways baked into the app that should help spread it to people that don't use RSS readers. Being able to share posts from the app (with a link back to BlogFire) is one way.

Installed. Quite ironically, this is more or less what I thought Notifo would aim to be the first time I stumbled upon your website.

While I'm not particularly crazy about receiving notifications from most blogs I read, what I'm really looking for (from a notification aggregator) is the ability to receive notifications from the sources that I care about (essentially, social networks + email + blogs) in one place.

What this means is, I can disable popups (alerts) and enjoy a zen-like experience. And when I do take a break, there's one app that lets me know about everything I've potentially missed out on and need to be updated about. Push notifications create this insatiable itch and the cognitive cost of context switching ensures that life goes downhill once more than a couple of apps have been allowed to notify me.

This is something I'd be happy to pay for (and I admit, I might be alone). I think Boxcar comes closest to scratching my itch, but their implementation still leaves a lot to be desired, so I guess there's an opportunity there.

Protip: you can follow your favorite github users' activity by entering

    github.com/username

and blogfire will find their feed for you. likewise you can follow project commits by entering

    github.com/username/project

Since github has an apple-touch-icon, you'll get the lovely Octocat staring back at you in the app!

I don't understand Notifo anymore. I thought the idea was that small companies would pay for push alerts in Notifo that contain links back to their webapp (or something).

Basically, a universal app until a company-specific one can be written.

I thought things weren't going well. How does releasing a free app help? Are you pivoting?

pivoting, yes. Notifo itself is still running, and there is a core group of users that love it, but it is almost too technical of a product to get really big the way I wanted.

BlogFire (and another app or so) is a more mainstream app, which will be monetized with some upcoming features I plan to build into the app, but for now I wanted to release it to see if it is even a product that people want, then iterate etc...

> almost too technical of a product to get really big the way I wanted

I can see how it's too developery/B2By.

> BlogFire (and another app or so) is a more mainstream app, which will be monetized with some upcoming features

I'm glad to hear that, good luck!

I'm definitely one of that core group, but since the twitter app started doing push notifications on mentions the only notifications I get from Notifo are ones I send myself from my webapps.

Grantit, I've found those insanely useful, but can see how that's only getting so big.

Me too. I have Growl set up to forward notifications to Notifo so I can get notified when interesting things happen during my work day (machine pave events, automation problems, etc.).

I feel like I'm a bit of a free-rider though, using Notifo's infrastructure without really offering any value back to them.

Are you the guys behing push.ly? Can you make it so that it doesn't request write access to my Twitter stream? I want to use it but I don't see why you need that :(

yes, we're behind push.ly. We need write access to send a tweet out if you decide to upgrade from the default level of following 3 people to 30 people. but we never tweet on your behalf without your express permission.

Unfortunately the way that Twitter's OAuth works, at least when I dove into it a few months ago, is that if you ever want to send out a Tweet on anyone's behalf (for totally legitimate reasons, with user permission etc), you have to request write permission from everyone. And whatever choice you make now, you're basically stuck with, for a variety of reasons. This is why the vast majority of apps decide to ask for both read and write access even if they don't need/want it right away.

You don't have to ask for it from everyone, you just have to know at auth time. If you don't know, I agree, it's a hassle...

write permission is set at an app level, not a per-user level... so asking at auth time is already to late to know.

Nope, you can do it when redirecting the user to the OAuth provider:

http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/gaining-read-only-acc...

Nice! How does that handle upgrading the permissions later? That was one of the big problems I ran into before: that we requested read access and then to get write access we had to have users first revoke permissions and then grant them again (a nonstarter.)

I'm not sure, unfortunately, but I assume that if you log the user in and out, requesting read-write permission the second time, it will ask.

Thanks!

Interesting. Is this actually real-time, or are you just frequently polling feed urls from a central source and then pushing them to the clients on a case-by-case basis? I'm assuming the latter, since the former has traditionally required participation on the part of the feed provider, in the form of something like Google's PubSubHubBub.

it's real-time when possible (if the publishers are using PSHB) otherwise it is polled as timely as possible. most posts come through within a few minutes of being posted.

Why are you offering it for free? I'd gladly pay for this. Feature request: I'd like to be able to subscribe to podcasts too.

You will have a chance to pay for it... there are going to be some in-app-purchase upgrades coming soon! Podcasts would be interesting... let me figure out how best to integrate that...

You should check out Instacast for podcasts. It's the reason I started listening to podcasts again. Well, that and http://5by5.tv

A month in review? Is that normal? What are the average review periods to be expected for both paid and free apps?

it was rejected 4 times (for various overly pedantic reasons based on their in-app-purchase policies). Each resubmittal review took 1 week. total time spent updating the app to fix rejections was about 8 hours. total wall-clock time was a month. ouch.

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