

A thought: disposable realtime notifications for webapps - dcurtis
http://blog.dustincurtis.com/crazy-idea-create-a-link-from-webapps-to-grow

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Sidnicious
It's a great idea (well, a great extension of Growl's concept), but the
infrastructure isn't there — not entirely.

For real-time notifications to happen (and be reasonably lightweight), you
need to have hooks into your monitored services. Growl works because its
clients send messages to the Growl server on your machine when something
interesting happens.

Web services will need to have a similar mechanism for (securely) telling your
notification service that "something happened." Weblogs are already most of
the way there: modern blogging engines can send HTTP "pings" when new entries
are posted. Apache sends its errors to a file, so it would need to be extended
to post errors to your notification service.

I'm rambling now, but if anyone wants to start a working group or somethin',
props. It's going to need some intelligent design to take the weight of the
whole internet flowing through it and to ensure that private notifications
(your web server, Facebook) don't get into the wrong hands.

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matthew-wegner
Sounds like a good use for web hooks: <http://webhooks.org/>

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showerst
In a similar vein, I'm noticing more and more social sites implement their own
site-specific chat frameworks, as well as notifications (I'm looking at _you_
facebook and gmail).

We went through this once with icq/aim/msn, and it would be nice if browser
vendors got together and worked out something that unified 'push' messaging
before everyone implemented it separately.

~~~
axod
I think competition here is pretty healthy. It's a new area, with lots of
innovation.

The WebSocket in HTML5 looks pretty good, hopefully that'll be implemented
soon.

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mcav
This would essentially be Push RSS; you could accomplish the same thing via
RSS but with polling. A push-based solution would be much cooler though, and
would make more sense for notifications or events.

~~~
ggchappell
Yes, but that's the easy part, isn't it. Anyone can write a quick polling app
based on RSS.

The hard part is (off the top of my head ...):

o Putting together a UI that people can use and will like. Notifications
should be quick and easy to set up. They should be noticeable enough to work,
but they should not cause problems with existing workflows. And the whole
system needs to be easy for the user to understand.

o If a new protocol: get sites all over to use it. If an existing one, figure
out how to wrap around it nicely (extract and display the right info, etc.).

o Integrate this with non-RSS stuff, like the things that Growl does.

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tezza
Please please just use Java. It's open source and runs cross platform. Then
you can get all those valuable Windows / IE users and not just Mac 5%

\---

From my previous post :: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552633>

* Desktop Notifications - This is solved, I wrote one myself[1]

Try using existing Java/Browser technology.

I would suggest this:

Each compatible web page has a signed applet which can also run resident on
the remote machine via Webstart. If the server is not listening yet, start it.

If it is listening, send it a message. The Webstart remote applet then
displays the message in the GUI.

My server just bound to a range of well known sockets, and the clients tried
each one in turn. Try to keep it simple. I just wrote a string with a carriage
return to the socket. No XML, no heaviweight protocol.

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mjs
I thought about doing this, but Growl running on one system (e.g. desktop) can
accept notifications generated by a different system (e.g. server), but
unfortunately the client library is Cocoa only, so you can't compile it on
your Linux host, etc. (I think this is all correct.) Has anyone "fixed" this?

~~~
tlrobinson
Netgrowl is a Python library:
<http://the.taoofmac.com/space/Projects/netgrowl>

Here's an example I threw together:
[http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-
notificat...](http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-
notifications-to-facebook/)

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jasonlbaptiste
Adobe is working on something like this. It's growl for web apps. Basically,
your web service pushes notifications to this app. It's exactly what you're
talking about. Once I dig more info up, I'll try to post it here.

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tlrobinson
I hacked together a Greasemonkey script + Python script that forwards Facebook
feed notifications to Growl a few months ago.

[http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-
notificat...](http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/09/01/adding-growl-
notifications-to-facebook/)

It's rather cumbersome to setup though, and I haven't used it since the day I
wrote it...

A nice centralized service that would connect users and web services would be
great.

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tumult
1\. Growl allows network connections, if you enable it. There are Windows and
Linux clients that implement the protocol, too.

2\. Scalable "Disposable realtime notifications" from server to clients/other
servers was implemented over 20 years ago, with IRC.

Some green Web 2.0 guy thinks he has a great idea, is actually reinventing
wheel, more news coming up at the top of the hour.

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lyime
Really interesting project I came across the other day. Juggernaut
(<http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/>) esentially a lightweight push server. I
am using it for a simple realtime web-chat client. Although you can use it for
for notifications. This would be sweet.

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adrianwaj
<http://imified.com> enables web applications to be IM enabled

~~~
ajkirwin
That's a bad idea, because you end up piggybacking on top of another service,
unless you do something like.. individual users run their own jabber servers.

~~~
thwarted
Or you could provide a jabber server that uses your web app's authentication
mechanism so users just need to add another IM account to the IM account they
are already using. Or things like growl could take an jabber server as a
configuration option to receive notifications from. Desktop notification is
mainly just a reformatting of the UI on technologies that already exist, are
in use, and are pervasive.

~~~
thwarted
Er, I meant "need to add another IM account to the IM application they are
already using".

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jmtulloss
There are three platforms that are doing this totally differently: Apple,
Palm, and Google. They're doing it in the mobile space, but if one of them
"wins" (ie, the others start supporting their push API), I can see the browser
vendors picking up on it too.

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bobbyi
I don't see why twitter isn't appropriate for this.

The reason given is that "Twitter facilitates user <=> user communication".
But he gives no explanation for why Twitter couldn't also be used for the
sorts of communication he discusses.

~~~
dryicerx
Just because twitter CAN do it does not mean it's the most appropriate. For
one the character limit kind of kills it if you want to send a really long
CallBackURL.

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jrockway
I use XMPP for this sort of thing.

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siong1987
My startup is using Juggernaut[1] for this purpose. The only drawback is it
only supports flash-ed browsers.

And, it is not polling.

[1] <http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/>

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luckyland
<http://github.com/ssoper/jquery-bosh/tree/master>

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dangrover
Divvyshot has a system like this -- it's pretty cool!

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jack7890
Superb idea. Wish I'd had it.

