Github Notifications API

Shameless plug!

We just added support for this on Zapier: http://zapier.com/zapbook/github/ We'll add some links to specific templates, but some good examples of ways to use it might be:

    * Send SMS for specific mentions (we support filters)
    * Power your own RSS feed (for Google Reader?)
    * Dump to chat programs (Hipchat, Campfire, etc...)
    * POST a JSON payload to some URL
    * and many more...

If you already have a Zapier account with a GitHub auth, you might need to re-authenticate to catch the notifications scope.

I found it interesting that this is ostensibly a notifications API, and nowhere is there any way to actually get notifications except by polling. I definitely understand why a push notification API would be a bad idea, but is polling with Last-Modified really the state of the art in notification APIs? What if you want to find out almost instantly when an event occurs, and not just at the granularity of your poll interval? At the API level, what do people use for this? Comet-style long polling? WebSockets? pubsubhubbub?

Finally! I've been waiting for this :) In case anyone of you likes to get notified about new issues, issue comments etc. on his homepage (like I do), you might want to have a look at http://updatified.com/ ;)

Aside from the shameless plug, what will you use it for?

And still there's no Github IFTTT channel.