

 Get email notifications of HN replies with Notifo (YC W10) - jazzychad
http://notifo.com/hackernews

======
jazzychad
Hi HN. We are testing out a new feature on Notifo: email notifications. We've
setup a special landing page for you to play with it.

Once you enable the email notifications, you'll be emailed anytime someone
replies to one of your comments on an HN thread, so you won't have to sit on
HN all day frantically refreshing the page :)

Also, if you want updates for your HN Karma points, I am using another site
called Femtoo - <http://femtoo.com/> \- (which also supports Notifo) that will
check my karma every so often and notify me when it changes.

Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback! Also feel free to use
this thread as a reply playground to test out the new emails.

Hopefully these email notifications will also help Android and BB users that
have push email, while we are still working away at native clients; but of
course this feature works for anyone that has an email account :)

~~~
siculars
I signed up for your service, I know it will be useful to me. Thanks for
putting it out there. The only concern I have is that it seems a bit self
serving that a YC funded company gets, what seems to be, preferential
treatment by having their own field in the users table. I feel you should
scrape like everyone else ;)

~~~
jazzychad
Scraping is a waste of resources for both parties involved. So is API polling
to some extent. If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time
web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work
together with event-based messaging/notifications. Twitter is great at this
with their Streaming API. Facebook is trying, but their real-time API is a bit
lacking at the moment.

We're just trying to build something people want, and according to pg, he has
received many requests for email notifications on HN, and we thought we could
help in this area.

~~~
johnrob
(edited for clarity)

Maybe notifo could act as a clearing house for all HN events. This way anyone
could access new post or new comment events.

In other words, my application could use notifo to subscribe to ALL HN events.

HN would of course have to ping notifo every time an event happens, instead of
only pinging when someone replies to a HN user with a notifo account defined.

Also, if I fill out my notifo box with my notifo name on my HN profile, HN
sends a one time message saying "johnrob_notifo" wants to follow "reply-
johnrob" events.

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InfinityX0
What's up with the grainy font on your website? I'm no designer but that's
pretty distracting and lowers the perceived value of your application.

~~~
dangrossman
I agree 100%.

When I see horridly aliased fonts like that, I always assume it's some kind of
Apple thing that just doesn't look right elsewhere.

Is that it?

<http://imgur.com/69eTV.png>

I use the latest Chrome on Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

~~~
PStamatiou
I think I might just disable Typekit for Windows. Please hold, researching.

~~~
jack7890
Something that's helped us: adding "text-shadow:0 1px 1px #FFF;". Particularly
useful with webkit. Adding the drop shadow ratchets up the perceived anti-
aliasing, even if the text is on top of a white background.

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brown9-2
This is a pretty genius way to get members of a messageboard/site to use your
service.

One minor critique: the instructions say "Once you have subscribed to HN
alerts, go to the Hacker News Service Settings page and make sure that Send
Email Notifications is checked", but I do not see any "Send Email
Notifications" checkbox on the page linked to.

~~~
jazzychad
Have you enabled Receive Email Notifications under the Advanced Settings?
<http://notifo.com/user/settings/advanced> \- this will display the email
checkboxes on the service settings pages.

~~~
brown9-2
Oops! Apparently I skipped step #2 :)

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Pistos2
Thank you. I asked for this in the past:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1194757>

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kqueue
It would be cool to integrate notifo with grawlnotify for mac users. This way
we can see the notification directly on the screen and avoid polluting our
inboxes.

~~~
jazzychad
Better yet, <http://notifo.com/desktop> \- NotifoGrowl does exactly this.

~~~
kqueue
ah, wasn't aware of that. Thanks!

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jl
Congrats Jazzy & Stammy!

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ritonlajoie
Hi, nice website ! Btw there is also <http://nasr.ath.cx> for that.

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corin_
Would love to see a native Blackberry app, but have signed up for the email
notifications :)

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Splines
I love your service.

Any plans for a WP7 native client and/or a NotifoGrowl Windows app?

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dsantos
great feature guys, i was waiting for email notifications.

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praeclarum
Isn't this incest?

