
Show HN: Hooks – Stay Up to Date on Anything Through Push Notifications - kozkozkoz
http://www.gethooksapp.com
======
hackercomplex
I have a feature request: I loved the idea at first glance but then I was
appalled to discover that there's nowhere to register a callback URL for any
of these events.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook)

To me it just seems obvious that there should be an either/or option for SMS
or HTTP especially since a metric shitton of people are already using slack
and hipchat.

The transmission costs for HTTP are way more cheap than SMS so it seems like
it would be in you guy's interest to support webhooks in order to reduce
outbound SMS costs.

TLDR; HTTP is the new SMS

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jakejake
This doesn't strike me as a developer tool (though it could obviously be used
by developers). It's for consumers. I don't know of many consumers who want to
receive notifications via webhook.

If they did do webhooks then you could write one that sent out SMSs though -
leave them to do the hard part while cutting them out of the loop!

Also I think it's push notifications, not SMS.

~~~
hackercomplex
This kind of thinking reminds me of Twitter in the early days where one
founder was trying to pigeonhole it into being for a particular use case.
Twitter began it's life as an SMS play also if my memory serves me correctly.

Really it's up to the startup.. do they want to try to eventually become the
Internet's primary notification propagation channel or are the only interested
in catering to a particular mobile phone use case ?

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joshschreuder
Nice work - looks like a cross between IFTTT and Pushbullet. What are your
differentiating factors?

~~~
kozkozkoz
Good question, I love both of this tools, while IFTTT is more about
automation, on Hooks we are focusing on notifications only. Our value is the
content, it's very easy to create alerts about many things with just one
click.

Actually we are working on adding Hooks as an IFTTT channel later this month
as a trigger so anyone can build their own receipts.

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christophersu
How does this differ from Pushbullet's channels?

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ngoel36
Is this better than Facebook's notify? (Which I actually love - relevant stuff
waiting for me on my lock screen without any audio notifications)

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kozkozkoz
It's different. On Facebook Notify you subscribe to a channel and then they
decide what you get, very similar to rss feed. On Hooks you customize what you
want to get exactly and where you want to get it from, like post with 200
points on HN so you get only the content you asked for.

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FreedomToCreate
They should call the app "Get Distracted". Its an interesting idea, and
potentially very useful, but most likely its going to become the annoying
reason your phone keeps going off every 5 minutes. Will give it a try to see.

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espinchi
When I first used it, I got overexcited and configured way too many alerts.
But I've been trimming it down heavily, and now a fair percentage of the
pushes I get are relevant to me.

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kozkozkoz
Cool, how long have you been using Hooks for? Actually this happens a lot, our
fault for sure, we need to remove some alerts like "TC all content" :)

~~~
espinchi
For a few months. Also, it's one of the few apps I reinstalled when I switched
phones. That says something :)

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finnn
Why does this need to be an app? What does it do that a website can't?

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espinchi
Well it's about push notifications to your phone, so it has to be an app.

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finnn
That is not true. [0] [1]

[2] is my crappy push notification service mostly built for my own usage
because PushBullet started getting more bloated and annoying.

[0]: [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-
notif...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-
notifications-on-the-open-web?hl=en)

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Push_API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Push_API)

[2]:
[https://github.com/thefinn93/EasyPush](https://github.com/thefinn93/EasyPush)

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cynix
None of these work natively on iOS.

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finnn
This doesn't work on iOS? I thought it did. [0] claims it can do this on
Chrome for iOS, or maybe by native you mean on Safari, which doesn't seem to
support it...

[0]: [https://storage-cdn.realtime.co/chrome-push/index.html](https://storage-
cdn.realtime.co/chrome-push/index.html)

~~~
cynix
Yeah by natively I meant without installing 3rd party apps, which is what the
GP complained about.

