Introducing Silent Diving Seagulls: An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Silent Diving Seagulls: An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications

blog.abi.sh

53 pointsabi11 comments

I'm the author of Silent Diving Seagulls and I just wanted to say something that I didn't include in the blogpost. I know, some of you probably think that instant Growl-like notifications are really distracting. I completely agree. Personally, I don't use notifications for emails or Twitter because it breaks my train of thought.

But one of the coolest things that could come out of having desktop notification support is this - say you have (1) a notification log and (2) a "Do Not Disturb" feature in your client. Then, if all your social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress start using it, you could easily have a neat log of all the happenings (sort of like mini personal FriendFeed). And we could go back to using email solely for 2-way communications. Email really shouldn't be used as a notification system. Email has been abused because it was the only easy solution in the past.

On a related note, Hacker News ought to notify you when someone replies to your comments or submissions.

I really like the name. It's an instance of what I hope is a trend toward a sort of surreal micro-poetic naming scheme.

This is awesome. We've been searching for a notification system for our users that is NOT e-mail for our product Ask My BrainTrust (http://askmybraintrust.com). For a product that tries to get you away from annoying e-mail threads, using e-mail as a form of notification seemed hypocritical. This would make an awesome alternative, especially since we already have XMPP baked into the backend.

Great! Once we figure out how to handle authorization (suggestions?), I'll email you. :P

"threads" on the top bar shows you all your comments, with replies. This is all you need.

A "Do not disturb" feature is crucial for when we're on the flow.

Kudos!

This looks amazing. We've been waiting for something like this that we can directly plug Fluther notifications into, without having to build and maintain our own desktop notification client.

Keep up the great work.

Thanks, it would be awesome to integrate this with Fluther. But there's still a lot of work to make this work especially on the authorization front. Let me know if you have any thoughts on that. And would you be willing to send Fluther notifications to a public open source web service such as Growl.fm or would you, as a website owner, prefer to run your own XMPP server to pass notifications directly to the user?

We already run a XMPP server for direct user notification.

I'm not familiar with Growl.fm, but I can say we're not at all ideologically opposed to using an open source web service. In general, we're looking for: - Good UI/install for end users - Minimal hassle to setup for us - Sensible authentication

When you think it's ready for primetime, shoot me an email (ben [at] fluther.com) and we can talk about setting something up.

I really hope one of these projects catches on. Notifications represent a gaping hole in browser functionality. Does anyone know if it's on the HTML5 radar at all?

We could definitely use this for ShopTalk (http://shoptalkapp.com). Keep up the good work.

I desperately want something like this to succeed before Twitter takes over the world and becomes the defacto standard with all it's closed, proprietary, single-vendor, feature deprived, insecure, unstable and unreliable patheticness.

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