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Get notifoed when people reply to your comments on Hacker News
62 points by pg on March 19, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 55 comments
You can now get notified on Notifo whenever someone replies to a comment you've made on HN. Just put your Notifo username in the notifo field on your profile.

Note: you may get notified before the reply is actually visible, if the commenter has a nonzero number in the delay field in their profile. So if you don't see the reply, just wait a few minutes.




Why is this better than http://notify.io/ ? Notifyio has been around longer and has a better support for people who don't use iPhones. Plus it's open source...

Plus, I am really suspicious of the whole the names only differ by one letter thing...


Please see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203422

The name difference is innocuous. The main reason for "notifo" was that the .com was available, honestly.


That's a neat feature, but it may conflict with 'noprocrast', in that it will drive you mad if you can see that there are replies but you can't read them :)

Why 'notifo', why not simply an email address ?

That's universal instead of a service that only works with the ipbone.


Because email can't make YC millions of dollars if it gets popular and makes a big exit.


Actually I wouldn't have integrated Notifo into HN if I didn't think it deserved it on its own merits. HN is a labor of love for me; I wouldn't integrate random stuff into it just because founders asked me to.

Out of 172 companies we've funded, I've only integrated 2 functionally into HN: Clickpass and Notifo, both because I thought they were useful to users.


Aren't you forgetting Scribd for PDFs?


Oh yes; ok, 3.


And webmynd.


And co2stats.


And mixpanel.


None of these 3 is a functional difference


No; that's why I was careful to write "integrated functionally." I didn't have to change the source of news.arc just to display a badge.


I never considered it, actually. It was a moot point till a couple months ago because we couldn't send email from the server. Rtm's strategy for security is to install nothing. Eventually I may expand notifications to have more options for type and delivery method.


Rtm's strategy for security is to install nothing.

I approve. :-)

That said, installing qmail is probably not going to open you up to very many attacks...


Ok, nice.

Everything and their brother supports email, there are so many gateways that once you are at the 'email' stage you can pretty much reach any device.


I've really wanted notifications for a while now; I figured email was the obvious and standard way to do something of that sort (hopefully you can add that soon).

On a related note, your comment is over a day old now - normally I wouldn't reply so long after the fact. Since I know you have notifications on, late replies are now worthwhile. There's a chance this feature can actually affect the discussion here by allowing people to ponder a while before responding. In the past you could only wait so long before the thread left the front page and everyone moved on; things were likely written in haste.


In the Notifo settings, you can set notifications to "Silent" (no audible alert) or "Stealth" (no notification event, just loads in your timeline) on a per-service basis. That could be one way to solve it?


What stops me from putting another user's notifo username? Most users use the same username on various sites...


Two things, I suppose—first, users can block services on the Notifo website, once they've [been] subscribed to them; second, developers have to sign up for an API key, so you can't just create a thousand spam services and subscribe a person to all of them.

I think it would pay to encourage users to use a shared secret in place of a username, though, since it's not going to be visible to anyone else, and so is really more of a "stream name."


Is this IPhone only? Have pity on the rest of us unwashed types not cool enough to own an IPhone(not to mention, not in the USA).


Check out notify.io (open source and has support for OSX, Windows, Ubuntu and Android)


Thank you. My phone is the last place I want to get such notifications.

I occasionally read HN on my G1, but doing much of any sort of reading or replying on a phone is a half-assed experience.

I'd much prefer to get E-mail (which, surprise! I can read on my phone if I so choose) or perhaps an RSS feed (which, again, I can read on my phone, if I so choose).

About the only reason I can see for making such things an "app" of some kind is to restrict how the user can use it and hack the results.


When I'm at home, I can just refresh the /threads page in the background. iPhones don't have a "background" to refresh such things in, so this is a useful niche.

I admit, though: an RSS -> iPhone push notification gateway would be more useful. (Though as far as I've seen, none of the iPhone RSS clients want to support Push, because none of their servers could handle the load. It would really just need to be a part of PubSubHubbub infrastructure.)


> Is this IPhone only?

Yep.

> Have pity on the rest of us unwashed types not cool enough to own an IPhone.

My thoughts exactly. There are a lot of mobiles out there that are not iphones, in spite of the iphones popularity.


It's iPhone only for now. Support for Android is in the very near future and BlackBerry right after that. This is explained on the notifo website.


I don't have a smartphone. I would sign up for this service if it would send me email when someone responded to my posts on HN.


I'm considering adding emails to notifo. It's on the todo list, but not high priorty right now.


Why not ? Email allows you to reach everybody that is online somehow, the iphone only allows you to reach a small subset of those.


because once you start using email, you no longer need notifo?


No money in it?


Emails can include ads...


Please support this.


I believe android and blackberry are coming (according to the techcrunch article).


This is an interesting way to provide a useful feature to HN readers and to promote Notifo as a brand.

I can't think of any fields to enter on my profile for any site I use that are also brand names.

Since many HN readers produce web content on their own sites (personal and business blogs, content from their startup's site, etc), will adding this feature to HN create a ripple effect on the web? Pretty awesome way to get traction, IMO.


PG,

Under what conditions will this notify you? I know it will notify you when you are a direct parent to the comment but is there a limit on how deep the nesting is before it stops notifying you? Is every comment below you counted as a response worthy of a notification?


Each child, but only children.


Notifo just launched today! http://notifo.com/

Other HN launch thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1202941


Why not notify people through Twitter? From Twitter I can get alerts to a regular mobile, not to mention to a Twitter client.


Fair point. In fact, why own the client at all? Be the middleman, and sent to twitter, facebook, hot social network of 2011, etc, instead of messing with clients. Lowers adoption barriers considerably.


The point is to make notifo the centerpiece, rather than tie it to whatever is the current fad.


because YC invested in Notifo


I haven't used this service before, but it's a good idea - thank you.

Will it also work for submissions? I've noticed lately that the threads page is slow, but clicking on 'submissions' via the profile page is crushingly slow. If I'm away for a day or two it can make it difficult to check up on older threads, or find the link to share at some later date.


meh, put it in another tab and click another HN article


I know someone hiring for a QA position, but somehow I suspect you're not interested.


FYI:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077411

Femtoo.com already does this :-)


Furthermore, because Femtoo publishes your tracker notifications as your own personal RSS Feed, you can already access all you notifications from ANY mobile platform that has an RSS Reader.... err. which is pretty much every platform :-)

Check it out at http://femtoo.com

oh and regarding seed funding for Femtoo.... watch this space...


Number of comments, updated every 30 minutes:

http://api.femtoo.com/trackers/content/?trackerKey=f2t4ba37b...

open, RESTful API's, no propriatory software required...


I think that notifo is a brilliant service, and I'm installing it right now. HN AND twitter? Why, I think I shall!


why would someone set the delay?


I do it because I find I often edit comments after posting them. Sometimes I have second thoughts and delete comments after saying something unwise.


Out of curiosity, how long is your delay and have you adjusted it over time? It's rare that I will think of some modification to (or the need to retract) a comment in the first minute or two after submitting it, so the only delay I could really see myself making use of would be 4 or 5 minutes. I'd be interested to see how many people use this, how frequently it comes in handy, and whether or not it's been fine-tuned to fit the way they think.


I used to have mine set at two minutes, but recently changed it to one. I found that I edit pretty hard for the first 2-3 minutes after submitting, but all the major changes come in the first minute, and whenever I reconsider and delete it's almost immediately.


2 minutes. I don't think I've ever changed it, since I added the feature.


To cool down a 'hot' thread ?

Hot as in flamewar like ?


crontab + wget + diff + grep -v + mail




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