Comment by zorbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zorbo | Hacker News Reader

What I really want is to stop my email inbox from being a notification area. It doesn't feel right for notifications. Foo replied to your post. Bug X has been fixed in project Y. All that stuff doesn't belong in my email inbox.

What I'd really like is a single online notification service. I imagine signing up for a service somewhere, and I just plunk my special notification address somewhere in the settings. The service then communicates to that online notification service instead of sending me emails. I could install an app on my phone and desktop (separately configurable) that alerts me. I can set up filters through the app or a web interface.

I'm not too hopeful about this ever happening though. No service will support it unless it's mainstream, and using the notification service is useless until most services support it. Chicken and the egg.

"What I'd really like is a single online notification service..."

Everything you say about this sounds exactly like hosted email to me. How is it different?

To me, the problem with email is the time it takes to manage it: filter, mark as read, etc. Gmail filters help with this, but it's still work. But I can't see how any notification system could know how I want things filtered without me telling it.

It would be nice if the community would agree on a simple header that indicates "notification" so it's easier to filter automatically.

You can use address tags to sign up for notifications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags E.g. if your email is username@gmail.com you can sign up for bugfix notifications as username+bugfix@gmail.com which makes inbox filtering much, much easier.

There are three currently defined headers that I can think of: Subject, Comments and Keywords. Personally, I think I would pick Keywords, but that's me.

I just have a filter to tag them and remove them from the inbox. I see no point in having to disparate interfaces and mechanisms that one has to configure and maintain.

This to me is what Google Wave should've been - a plug-in to Gmail that allows notifications as well as free-form discussions involving complex media types.

Perhaps IFTTT (http://ifttt.com/wtf) might be a start towards what you're looking for?

See Notifo: http://blog.notifo.com/notifo

Seems the idea does not sell, the company went bankrupt.

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