

Announcing BlogFire - new from Notifo (YC W10) - jazzychad
http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/06/10/announcing-blogfire-rss-push-notifications.html

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michaelfairley
The last thing I want is for TechCrunch to be able to push to me.

That said, I think this is an excellent way of making RSS accessible to lots
of non-techies, especially those who use an iPhone/iPad more than a computer.
How do you plan on getting this in front of people who don't already use an
RSS reader?

~~~
jazzychad
To each his own :) I go back and forth on turning TC on and off. The nice
thing about BlogFire is that you can subscribe to as many feeds as you want in
the app and enable/disable notifications on a per-feed basis. Then you can
just use the app as a feed reader for the others.

There are a couple of ways baked into the app that should help spread it to
people that don't use RSS readers. Being able to share posts from the app
(with a link back to BlogFire) is one way.

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noelsequeira
Installed. Quite ironically, this is more or less what I thought Notifo would
aim to be the first time I stumbled upon your website.

While I'm not particularly crazy about receiving notifications from most blogs
I read, what I'm really looking for (from a notification aggregator) is the
ability to receive notifications from the sources that I care about
(essentially, social networks + email + blogs) in one place.

What this means is, I can disable popups (alerts) and enjoy a zen-like
experience. And when I do take a break, there's one app that lets me know
about everything I've potentially missed out on and need to be updated about.
Push notifications create this insatiable itch and the cognitive cost of
context switching ensures that life goes downhill once more than a couple of
apps have been allowed to notify me.

This is something I'd be happy to pay for (and I admit, I might be alone). I
think Boxcar comes closest to scratching my itch, but their implementation
still leaves a lot to be desired, so I guess there's an opportunity there.

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jazzychad
Protip: you can follow your favorite github users' activity by entering

    
    
        github.com/username
    

and blogfire will find their feed for you. likewise you can follow project
commits by entering

    
    
        github.com/username/project
    

Since github has an apple-touch-icon, you'll get the lovely Octocat staring
back at you in the app!

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jolan
I don't understand Notifo anymore. I thought the idea was that small companies
would pay for push alerts in Notifo that contain links back to their webapp
(or something).

Basically, a universal app until a company-specific one can be written.

I thought things weren't going well. How does releasing a free app help? Are
you pivoting?

~~~
jazzychad
pivoting, yes. Notifo itself is still running, and there is a core group of
users that love it, but it is almost too technical of a product to get really
big the way I wanted.

BlogFire (and another app or so) is a more mainstream app, which will be
monetized with some upcoming features I plan to build into the app, but for
now I wanted to release it to see if it is even a product that people want,
then iterate etc...

~~~
StavrosK
Are you the guys behing push.ly? Can you make it so that it doesn't request
write access to my Twitter stream? I want to use it but I don't see why you
need that :(

~~~
ericflo
Unfortunately the way that Twitter's OAuth works, at least when I dove into it
a few months ago, is that if you _ever_ want to send out a Tweet on _anyone's_
behalf (for totally legitimate reasons, with user permission etc), you have to
request write permission from _everyone_. And whatever choice you make now,
you're basically stuck with, for a variety of reasons. This is why the vast
majority of apps decide to ask for both read and write access even if they
don't need/want it right away.

~~~
StavrosK
You don't have to ask for it from everyone, you just have to know at auth
time. If you don't know, I agree, it's a hassle...

~~~
jazzychad
write permission is set at an app level, not a per-user level... so asking at
auth time is already to late to know.

~~~
StavrosK
Nope, you can do it when redirecting the user to the OAuth provider:

[http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/gaining-read-only-
acc...](http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/gaining-read-only-access-to-
twitters-api)

~~~
ericflo
Nice! How does that handle upgrading the permissions later? That was one of
the big problems I ran into before: that we requested read access and then to
get write access we had to have users first revoke permissions and then grant
them again (a nonstarter.)

~~~
StavrosK
I'm not sure, unfortunately, but I assume that if you log the user in and out,
requesting read-write permission the second time, it will ask.

~~~
ericflo
Thanks!

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Pewpewarrows
Interesting. Is this actually real-time, or are you just frequently polling
feed urls from a central source and then pushing them to the clients on a
case-by-case basis? I'm assuming the latter, since the former has
traditionally required participation on the part of the feed provider, in the
form of something like Google's PubSubHubBub.

~~~
jazzychad
it's real-time when possible (if the publishers are using PSHB) otherwise it
is polled as timely as possible. most posts come through within a few minutes
of being posted.

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matthodan
Why are you offering it for free? I'd gladly pay for this. Feature request:
I'd like to be able to subscribe to podcasts too.

~~~
jazzychad
You will have a chance to pay for it... there are going to be some in-app-
purchase upgrades coming soon! Podcasts would be interesting... let me figure
out how best to integrate that...

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physcab
A month in review? Is that normal? What are the average review periods to be
expected for both paid and free apps?

~~~
jazzychad
it was rejected 4 times (for various overly pedantic reasons based on their
in-app-purchase policies). Each resubmittal review took 1 week. total time
spent updating the app to fix rejections was about 8 hours. total wall-clock
time was a month. ouch.

