Show HN: Chime - A Notification Center for the Web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Chime - A Notification Center for the Web

chimeapp.com

161 pointstrq_116 comments

This looks great, congratulations.

1) Do you have any plans to allow arbitrary RSS as notifications, or integrating with ITTT? This could allow people to create notifications for services that you don't support.

2) While I don't believe everything has to be monetized, I was wondering if you do have a plan to make money, and if you do, would you mind sharing?

Thanks and great questions!

1. We're currently looking at creative options to support personalized notifications. One possibility is something similar to what Rapportive did and provide sites with a way to deliver notifications.

2. We honestly did this because it was a need we had. We're looking at a number of strategies. The most likely is a set of premium features for a one-time fee. That said, we might just leave it free too.

What about limiting the number of services for the free version; say the first five are free, then a one time fee to unlock additional.

This is certainly one option and we're still thinking. Our main goal is to make cool stuff that people love, and then we'll focus on monetization. :-)

That's the only way to go about it, IMO.

It seems that in today's world, too many companies get a hair-brained idea from some executive that thinks they've got it all figured out, spend 100's of thousands building it, and millions to market it... only to discover that nobody actually likes it and/or will ever use it.

I don't want to name names (as I'm not looking to start a flamewar), but off the top-of-my-head I can think of several very prominent, very successful (historically) corporations that seem to use such a marketing-driven approach: instead of letting users fall in love with the product by their own devices, instead the corp tries to make the product and only then do they try to sell the user on why they should love it.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it doesn't it can be a costly mistake. When you have a compelling product or service, marketing is minimal; word-of-mouth is king!

Cheers, your service looks very cool.

Really appreciate your comment! I really do agree with your sentiments.

I dislike this sort of limit. The best freemium schemes provide a full enough featured service for free users and fee-based services that obviously make sense for a segment of customers willing and able to pay. Limiting the number of services severely cripples the basic service.

Just launched 5 days ago! Over 100k notifications served.

We're completely client side, so there are no privacy concerns.

This works very nicely. This is probably the most refined and well designed Chrome extension I've ever seen. Great job! You may want to gray/hide 'Clear all' when nothing new is showing up.

Does it also do reddit's http://www.reddit.com/message/moderator/ mail? Will it ping Gmail a lot? I stopping using any Gmail extensions because Google treats frequent queries as bots and blocks the originating IP for hours.

Also, nice name :) For well over a decade, I've been doing things under the name 'chime' so it's a bit weird when I see someone else create apps with that name.

Hey chime (god this is weird): we had that problem months ago, but we decreased the ping frequency and there haven't been any issues.

It doesn't currently do moderator mail, but I'll add it to the issue tracker. Thanks!

Another thing you may want to do is stop pinging Gmail if it returns a couple of failures. I noticed that when Gmail signed off automatically for any reason, any additional pings caused the account to be locked. This is purely anecdotal so dig into it yourself if you have some time. Last thing you want to do is cause Gmail to block your users' mailboxes.

Thanks for the heads up! Gmail was the first service we implemented and have been testing thoroughly so we had some time to settle on an optimal ping frequency. As for now, we're confident this will not block your Gmail.

Congrats on the initial success!

If you are completely client side, how are you tracking the total number of notifications served? I would assume you would have to send some data back to the server to keep track?

Thanks! We're just tracking the analytics with Google Analytics.

Haha, that's true. We use google analytics for anonymized data.

Congrats!

If it's completely client side, how do you count the notifications? I guess something needs to be sent home, right?

Thanks! If you mean for analytics, then we're just using Google Analytics to count notifications served.

Just curious: if there is no server-side stuff how would you know you have served over 100k notifications?

Only Google Analytics :-)

I read that as "Crime" for a moment, thought it would be some kind of real-time notification centre for when a crime is happening near you. I suppose police radios are encrypted these days, otherwise it could be interesting to recognize location from the calls, and show a pin on google map say: "bank robbery in progress 2.1 miles north of you; adam-4 responding". Then you can also add a social element: like foodspotting... but for criminals.

Hmm.. foodspotting for criminals. I like it. Do they get OpenTable integration? haha.

Agreed, I was just about to post the exact same thing.

This looks fantastic.

Just one bit. Are you proudly developing this only for Chrome, or is that just a support limitation right now?

I ask this because you didn't write something along the lines of expecting it to be released elsewhere soon - you wrote "exclusively" for Chrome.

I ask this because I currently use Firefox most frequently (although I installed Chime on my Chrome installation to test it). It might be a bit of a market limitation later when you try to monetize this if you only develop on Chrome.

And also, do you have any plans to allow independent hackers to write in their own notifications? Will I be able to write in notifications for platforms too obscure or unpopular to make a mainstream update for?

EDIT: I forgot one thing. Would you consider doing this for desktop applications as well, like Growl on Mac?

Thanks! We developed Chime for Chrome first just to get it out in the hands of our users. Based on the responses in the first week since launch, we're already looking at support for Firefox/Safari.

I also mentioned this elsewhere in this thread, but we're hoping to create a way for other sites to deliver notifications through Chime. Haven't considered independent hackers just yet, but it is something we'll keep in mind.

There are platforms like CrossRider[1] or trigger.io[2] that allow you to deploy cross-browser add-ons, should be easy to port to since it's already in javascript.

[1] http://crossrider.com/ [2] http://docs.trigger.io/en/v1.4/modules/browser/index.html

Exclusively for Google Chro(Ctrl+W).

(But I liked the screenshot).

Haha, that's alright. We're considering support for Firefox and Safari soon depending on the initial response. Thanks!

Happy to read it, I'll give it a try when it's available :)

Awesome, make sure to follow @ChimeApp on twitter to stay in the loop

Haaaa, literally laughed out loud here, thanks =).

One feature that I can see possibly being valuable here is the ability to filer, prioritize, or otherwise throttle the notifications.

An example would be my usage of Google Reader; there's a Chrome app[1] that shows notifications for new items, but I haven't been under 1000 new items in years ("1000+" is as high as it tracks). Yes, I have many feeds I need to prune out, but even then, I may get upwards of 100 new items a day in my reader and I sure as heck don't care about them all. I really just care about items from a few select sources, but without a way to filter out the noise it's useless.

I'm not sure if that use-case would be very common for your app, although there's times when I make a popular FB post that I tend to ignore the notifications once they get past about 10.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-reader-noti...

Hmm.. this is interesting, something we'll look into for the future of Chime. For now, we only have filtering by sites.

Color me impressed gentlemen. A useful idea with great execution.

Now how about:

1) Ability to sleep/snooze on notifications. The use case would be when we are working in the browser and require focus. Some of us feel overly compelled to click little red notification badges, which can be distracting. Yes shame on us! :)

2) Make coffee and walk the dog

Thanks!

1. This is definitely in the works. 2. Uhh... yes, we'll put that on our "backlog"

:-)

All my Gmail notfications are 43 years old. I'm in europe so maybe it can't handle the 24h time format?

Apart from that it's really great! Would love to see some common forums supported (but that would be tricky as you would need access to many different domains).

Thanks! This is something we've had a few reports about this morning so we're working hard to fix it right away.

This looks really cool, but one thing I'd love to see/know before I install.

Do you send me a notification whenever something happens, or can you pool them together and only interrupt me every few hours? Hint: I want the latter.

Thanks! You can turn off desktop notifications and just check when you feel like being interrupted. The pooling together is something we're working on down the road.

Right now we send a notification as soon as it happens. We're looking at implementing a pause mode, so you wouldn't get interrupted by notifications when you need to focus.

Pooling notifications is interesting, we'll definitely be looking at that in the future!

Beautiful, thanks very much. Is it possible to not receive popups when new notifications arrive? I prefer notifications to be totally silent until I decide to look at them..

Thanks! Of course, click on the Chime pop-up ==> Settings ==> turn off desktop notifications.

Wow, this is a slick interface. I love the Windows Metro look and feel. Great job with this, I'm excited to use this and not have to worry about keeping a bunch of tabs open! How often does it check for new notifications? It would be nice if you could set a variable to check for new notifications every 1 min, 5 mins, 15 mins, etc.

Do you have a donate link or something? I would love to say "thank you" with a little money gift to thank you guys for your hard work! :)

We added a small donation link to the bottom of our Help page: http://chimeapp.com/help

Great to hear that you like Chime! The frequency is different for every service, and is also based on a few other metrics. It'll pick up notifications within a few minutes, usually.

Always the simple products that come through.

Quick question: I'm logged into multiple Gmail accounts - will it grab from both, or just the active account?

Currently, just the active one. We're definitely working on multiple gmail accounts, so hold tight!

This definitely looks like a great piece of software.

However, I believe different services, hence different types of information, should have their own way of being displayed.

For example, seeing a one-line summary of an email doesn't appeal to me that much.

That's why I always prefer using the web app itself (or a dedicated extension in the case of Gmail).

Thanks! We tried to cater to the way users interact with different services. We can look into adding more options to customize notifications down the road.

That'd be nice. Is there a way to be notified when such a thing goes live (mailing list)? That'd be a shame if you didn't, seeing all the coverage you're having!

You can follow @ChimeApp on twitter! If you have Chime installed, you'll see the updates automatically. :-)

I didn't realize how little was going on in my extended internet life until I installed this app.

I felt the same way... Thanks for the comment though!

Looks pretty amazing so far. I've gone through a couple Google mail extensions, and using Chrome for Linux and Chromium for Linux with my google sync setup, I've had trouble finding one that works properly.

This seems to work great for Chromium on Ubuntu.

Thanks! The three of us working on it are all using different platforms and we've had awesome beta users who have helped us out a lot!

Love this idea and execution. Any plans to add rich notifications for G+? It would be great to see info about the notification (and ideally interact with it) from the extension (vs a notification page or redirect to plus.google.com).

So we spent a good deal of time trying to do this. Google explicitly does not provide notification details for G+[1] so our hands are bit tied here. Chime does its best still convey your new G+ notifications with that limitation.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?...

I like this!

One problem though: if I click a notification for gmail (probably others too) it opens a new tab. I already have gmail opened (I have it pinned), can you please use my existing tab to open the email in (or make it configurable)?

Thanks! We've heard this feedback from a few others and probably will add a few different configurations in the next update :-)

Why Chrome only? This looks like something that could work just as well on Firefox

Yup, we built Chime for Chrome just to get the product out in the hands of our users. We've realized the response for Firefox/Safari is overwhelming so we'll be looking into support for those browsers as well.

Ah ok. Sounds great then! I was just surprised to read "exclusively for Google Chrome"

Any plans to add other "social" source code hosting services?

Hey cheez, do you have any examples? Github should count =)

Bitbucket was the one I was thinking about :)

We have Github already, but have had an overwhelming amount of requests for Bitbucket. So it's on our radar!

Excellent, that was the one I had in mind.

For people who don't want to be productive ever again.

Sorry, I shouldn't be so negative, it looks like a great app. I just know that's the effect it would have on me.

We're working on giving you a mute button. We want to make it _easier_ for you to manage your notifications.

Thanks for your input! You can always turn off desktop notifications and just check when you want.

I've actually found that having instant notifications about events on distracting sites keeps me from checking those distracting sites and coming across other distractions on them. Net win.

I agree with you. Having my FB notifications delivered through Chime, I rarely have to actually go on Facebook now. That said, everyone has a different preference for their notifications. :-)

Not sure how this would work, but if I want notifications from everywhere, this would need to include IRC chat when people ping me with my name.

We'll certainly look into this, but not sure if this fits the objective of Chime.

Perhaps the Chime folks would be kind enough to write a ZNC module to allow for that type of integration: http://wiki.znc.in/Modules

Perhaps...

can I have Microsoft Exchange OWA integration?

Thanks for the feedback! We're definitely considering putting this on our roadmap.

+1 for this!

Great work. Really love the well refined interface.

Not that I care about it much, but as a feedback, I am not able to get LinkedIn to work.

Thanks! Can you send us an email at support@chimeapp.com describing the issue that you're having. Are you logged-in to LinkedIn?

I am logged in, and I tried a browser restart, and a logoff-login as well, to no avail

Send us a note support@chimeapp.com with a screenshot please of the "All notifications" page :-)

This looks awesome. What plans do you have for other services (off the top of my head, I'd love Dribbble and Tumblr)?

We're looking at adding some of the most requested services (like multiple Gmail accounts) first. We'll definitely add any requests to our backlog, so I'll put your requests on there as well.

Sweet! I just asked this! That's probably the most pressing feature I can see so far. +1

I've been trying to find a replacement for One Number, a Chrome extension that notifies for Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Voice.

Google Voice notifications aren't a big deal since I get them in e-mail anyway, but having Google Reader notifications would be really nice.

Is it open source? Can I see the code?

Edit: Specifically I want to validate the claim "all my data stays on my browser"

It's not open source. You can verify this by the fact you have no login for Chime, so if you switch computers there's no "user profile" for you following you around. Beyond that, I'm not sure how else you want to verify this claim.

Feel free to inspect the background page and look at the network requests we're making. We're doing requests to Google Analytics to store counts (e.g. how many installs we have, how many notifications are clicked, etc.) but there is absolutely no data from the notifications or any personally identifying information about you.

I get this error on Chrome 26.0.1403.0: "Could not install package: 'COULD_NOT_GET_TEMP_DIRECTORY'"

Please ensure you're logged into Google Chrome as this is enforced by Google. This may also be due to the instability of the nightly build for Chrome Dev.

Looks really neat and professional. Any chance to get notified about HN comments/karma changes?

Thanks! HN is something we would want too, so we're looking into it as well.

Hey gingerlime, unfortunately hn doesn't offer notifications itself, so that would be difficult to implement, and outside the scope of Chime. I'm definitely feeling your pain right now, though =P

Reminds me of Friendfeed. Few quick mashups could do the same in the good ol' Web 2.0 way.

Would love to have this on my iPhone lock screen with intelliscreen.

We would love to be on your iPhone's lock screen. That would mean a different type of app for us though, with a server and all.

Heaven forbid we have to actually _use_ a server.

I'll provide the server, you provide the client. deal?

Possibly haha.. Feel free to email us feedback support@chimeapp.com or tweet us anytime @ChimeApp

Anyone else seeing the error: "Download was not a CRX"

It means you're not signed into Chrome on the webstore, which Google requires. Are you sure you're running the most updated version of Chrome? If you're still having trouble send us a note support@chimeapp.com :-)

Thanks, never saw that before. Was logged in to Google Account on the browser sync, but apparently not the store.

This is so awesome. Any chance of yahoo mail?

You're the second person to mention this (the first was my dad), so we'll definitely look into it.. :-)

The "Clear All" button is not working for me.

I did a "Clear All" and the notifications just disappeared from the extension, my Gmail mails are still unread.

I had 49 notifications upon installing it (my inbox has ~200 unread e-mails), maybe that triggered a bug. I disabled Gmail an it works now.

Clear all will just hide all notifications from Chime. Marking them as read is too undo-able, we wouldn't want users to accidentally mark a ton of important emails as read.

Perhaps we should change it to "Hide All"...

This is really cool, nice job!

Thanks!

This supports the only browser thats ruining the Internet. Oh well. It looks nice though.

Hmm, why do you think that it's ruining the Internet?

It's creating a Google monopoly over the web. Chrome's not open source. Chrome has light to moderate tracking issues. Developers are starting to only support one or two browsers (talking about websites not extensions) , which I think is absurd and it reduces competition. I think Firefox is a better browser than Chrome/ium in a few ways and vice versa. You're the developer I'm assuming. You've made a great product for a popular browser, so there's nothing to worry about for you, but I think if people switched to Firefox, the Internet would be a better place. Good luck!

Whoa, sorry for all the super short sentences, I can't seem to figure out linebreaks, I don't comment often.

This is awesome Fahd!

Thanks Fil!

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