1) Do you have any plans to allow arbitrary RSS as notifications, or integrating with ITTT? This could allow people to create notifications for services that you don't support.
2) While I don't believe everything has to be monetized, I was wondering if you do have a plan to make money, and if you do, would you mind sharing?
1. We're currently looking at creative options to support personalized notifications. One possibility is something similar to what Rapportive did and provide sites with a way to deliver notifications.
2. We honestly did this because it was a need we had. We're looking at a number of strategies. The most likely is a set of premium features for a one-time fee. That said, we might just leave it free too.
It seems that in today's world, too many companies get a hair-brained idea from some executive that thinks they've got it all figured out, spend 100's of thousands building it, and millions to market it... only to discover that nobody actually likes it and/or will ever use it.
I don't want to name names (as I'm not looking to start a flamewar), but off the top-of-my-head I can think of several very prominent, very successful (historically) corporations that seem to use such a marketing-driven approach: instead of letting users fall in love with the product by their own devices, instead the corp tries to make the product and only then do they try to sell the user on why they should love it.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it doesn't it can be a costly mistake. When you have a compelling product or service, marketing is minimal; word-of-mouth is king!
I dislike this sort of limit. The best freemium schemes provide a full enough featured service for free users and fee-based services that obviously make sense for a segment of customers willing and able to pay. Limiting the number of services severely cripples the basic service.
This works very nicely. This is probably the most refined and well designed Chrome extension I've ever seen. Great job! You may want to gray/hide 'Clear all' when nothing new is showing up.
Does it also do reddit's http://www.reddit.com/message/moderator/ mail? Will it ping Gmail a lot? I stopping using any Gmail extensions because Google treats frequent queries as bots and blocks the originating IP for hours.
Also, nice name :) For well over a decade, I've been doing things under the name 'chime' so it's a bit weird when I see someone else create apps with that name.
Another thing you may want to do is stop pinging Gmail if it returns a couple of failures. I noticed that when Gmail signed off automatically for any reason, any additional pings caused the account to be locked. This is purely anecdotal so dig into it yourself if you have some time. Last thing you want to do is cause Gmail to block your users' mailboxes.
Thanks for the heads up! Gmail was the first service we implemented and have been testing thoroughly so we had some time to settle on an optimal ping frequency. As for now, we're confident this will not block your Gmail.
If you are completely client side, how are you tracking the total number of notifications served? I would assume you would have to send some data back to the server to keep track?
I read that as "Crime" for a moment, thought it would be some kind of real-time notification centre for when a crime is happening near you. I suppose police radios are encrypted these days, otherwise it could be interesting to recognize location from the calls, and show a pin on google map say: "bank robbery in progress 2.1 miles north of you; adam-4 responding". Then you can also add a social element: like foodspotting... but for criminals.
Just one bit. Are you proudly developing this only for Chrome, or is that just a support limitation right now?
I ask this because you didn't write something along the lines of expecting it to be released elsewhere soon - you wrote "exclusively" for Chrome.
I ask this because I currently use Firefox most frequently (although I installed Chime on my Chrome installation to test it). It might be a bit of a market limitation later when you try to monetize this if you only develop on Chrome.
And also, do you have any plans to allow independent hackers to write in their own notifications? Will I be able to write in notifications for platforms too obscure or unpopular to make a mainstream update for?
EDIT: I forgot one thing. Would you consider doing this for desktop applications as well, like Growl on Mac?
Thanks! We developed Chime for Chrome first just to get it out in the hands of our users. Based on the responses in the first week since launch, we're already looking at support for Firefox/Safari.
I also mentioned this elsewhere in this thread, but we're hoping to create a way for other sites to deliver notifications through Chime. Haven't considered independent hackers just yet, but it is something we'll keep in mind.
There are platforms like CrossRider[1] or trigger.io[2] that allow you to deploy cross-browser add-ons, should be easy to port to since it's already in javascript.
One feature that I can see possibly being valuable here is the ability to filer, prioritize, or otherwise throttle the notifications.
An example would be my usage of Google Reader; there's a Chrome app[1] that shows notifications for new items, but I haven't been under 1000 new items in years ("1000+" is as high as it tracks). Yes, I have many feeds I need to prune out, but even then, I may get upwards of 100 new items a day in my reader and I sure as heck don't care about them all. I really just care about items from a few select sources, but without a way to filter out the noise it's useless.
I'm not sure if that use-case would be very common for your app, although there's times when I make a popular FB post that I tend to ignore the notifications once they get past about 10.
Color me impressed gentlemen. A useful idea with great execution.
Now how about:
1) Ability to sleep/snooze on notifications. The use case would be when we are working in the browser and require focus. Some of us feel overly compelled to click little red notification badges, which can be distracting. Yes shame on us! :)
All my Gmail notfications are 43 years old. I'm in europe so maybe it can't handle the 24h time format?
Apart from that it's really great! Would love to see some common forums supported (but that would be tricky as you would need access to many different domains).
This looks really cool, but one thing I'd love to see/know before I install.
Do you send me a notification whenever something happens, or can you pool them together and only interrupt me every few hours? Hint: I want the latter.
Right now we send a notification as soon as it happens. We're looking at implementing a pause mode, so you wouldn't get interrupted by notifications when you need to focus.
Pooling notifications is interesting, we'll definitely be looking at that in the future!
Thanks! You can turn off desktop notifications and just check when you feel like being interrupted. The pooling together is something we're working on down the road.
Beautiful, thanks very much. Is it possible to not receive popups when new notifications arrive? I prefer notifications to be totally silent until I decide to look at them..
Wow, this is a slick interface. I love the Windows Metro look and feel. Great job with this, I'm excited to use this and not have to worry about keeping a bunch of tabs open! How often does it check for new notifications? It would be nice if you could set a variable to check for new notifications every 1 min, 5 mins, 15 mins, etc.
Do you have a donate link or something? I would love to say "thank you" with a little money gift to thank you guys for your hard work! :)
Great to hear that you like Chime! The frequency is different for every service, and is also based on a few other metrics. It'll pick up notifications within a few minutes, usually.
Thanks! We tried to cater to the way users interact with different services. We can look into adding more options to customize notifications down the road.
That'd be nice. Is there a way to be notified when such a thing goes live (mailing list)? That'd be a shame if you didn't, seeing all the coverage you're having!
Looks pretty amazing so far. I've gone through a couple Google mail extensions, and using Chrome for Linux and Chromium for Linux with my google sync setup, I've had trouble finding one that works properly.
Love this idea and execution. Any plans to add rich notifications for G+? It would be great to see info about the notification (and ideally interact with it) from the extension (vs a notification page or redirect to plus.google.com).
So we spent a good deal of time trying to do this. Google explicitly does not provide notification details for G+[1] so our hands are bit tied here. Chime does its best still convey your new G+ notifications with that limitation.
One problem though: if I click a notification for gmail (probably others too) it opens a new tab. I already have gmail opened (I have it pinned), can you please use my existing tab to open the email in (or make it configurable)?
Yup, we built Chime for Chrome just to get the product out in the hands of our users. We've realized the response for Firefox/Safari is overwhelming so we'll be looking into support for those browsers as well.
I've actually found that having instant notifications about events on distracting sites keeps me from checking those distracting sites and coming across other distractions on them. Net win.
I agree with you. Having my FB notifications delivered through Chime, I rarely have to actually go on Facebook now. That said, everyone has a different preference for their notifications. :-)
We're looking at adding some of the most requested services (like multiple Gmail accounts) first. We'll definitely add any requests to our backlog, so I'll put your requests on there as well.
Feel free to inspect the background page and look at the network requests we're making. We're doing requests to Google Analytics to store counts (e.g. how many installs we have, how many notifications are clicked, etc.) but there is absolutely no data from the notifications or any personally identifying information about you.
It's not open source. You can verify this by the fact you have no login for Chime, so if you switch computers there's no "user profile" for you following you around. Beyond that, I'm not sure how else you want to verify this claim.
Please ensure you're logged into Google Chrome as this is enforced by Google. This may also be due to the instability of the nightly build for Chrome Dev.
Hey gingerlime, unfortunately hn doesn't offer notifications itself, so that would be difficult to implement, and outside the scope of Chime. I'm definitely feeling your pain right now, though =P
It means you're not signed into Chrome on the webstore, which Google requires. Are you sure you're running the most updated version of Chrome? If you're still having trouble send us a note support@chimeapp.com :-)
Clear all will just hide all notifications from Chime. Marking them as read is too undo-able, we wouldn't want users to accidentally mark a ton of important emails as read.
It's creating a Google monopoly over the web.
Chrome's not open source.
Chrome has light to moderate tracking issues.
Developers are starting to only support one or two browsers (talking about websites not extensions) , which I think is absurd and it reduces competition.
I think Firefox is a better browser than Chrome/ium in a few ways and vice versa.
You're the developer I'm assuming. You've made a great product for a popular browser, so there's nothing to worry about for you, but I think if people switched to Firefox, the Internet would be a better place. Good luck!
1) Do you have any plans to allow arbitrary RSS as notifications, or integrating with ITTT? This could allow people to create notifications for services that you don't support.
2) While I don't believe everything has to be monetized, I was wondering if you do have a plan to make money, and if you do, would you mind sharing?