

Introducing Silent Diving Seagulls: An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications - abi
http://blog.abi.sh/2009/silent-diving-seagulls/

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abi
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.

~~~
Tawheed
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.

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

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jobenjo
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.

~~~
abi
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?

~~~
jobenjo
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.

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mrshoe
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.

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zmimon
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.

