Web notifications just got real with Notify.io

The “real-time web” is a popular topic right now. My WebHooks initiative is both riding on this success and helping make it a reality. One sector of this trend is about notifications. Real-time notifications to you about events you care about.

For a long time we’ve had helper apps like the Google Notifier and more recently the Facebook Desktop Notifications app that bring events from the web to your desktop. Twitter has created a whole ecosystem of clients that not only let you actively check Twitter, but passively get updates from Twitter.

Simultaneously, we’ve had a bunch of systems like Growl emerge that give you a consistent, well-designed and customizable system for local applications to give you notifications. While your IM client is in the background, it can tell you somebody IM’d you and what they said in an unobtrusive way. It integrates with email applications to tell you of new emails. It gives any application developer a nice way to present notifications to the user in a way that’s in their control.

Some of the apps that bring web applications to your desktop like Tweetie, Google Notifier, etc will integrate with Growl (which has a counterpart on pretty much every platform, including the iPhone). The problem is that you only get these notifications when the desktop apps are running, despite the fact web apps are always running. And yes, you have to have an app running for each web application you use.

And that’s only if they built a desktop app and you were convinced to download it. Most web applications are never be able to notify you with any means other than email. But as I’ve argued before, notifications don’t belong in your inbox!

Another minor point is that all these apps use polling to get updates. In some cases this doesn’t matter, but as data starts moving in real-time, this batches your notifications into bursts that you may not be able to parse all at once. I use Tweetie to get Growl notifications from Twitter at the moment, and if a lot of people are updating, I get a huge screen of updates that I don’t have time to read before they disappear. It becomes useless.

A while back I attempted to make an app called Yapper that lets anybody send real-time notifications to your desktop via XMPP. It was an experiment, and ultimately not the answer. It was only part of the solution.

But today I’m announcing the full solution: a free, public, open-source web service called Notify.io (Notify-I-O).

Notify.io integrates with Growl and other local notifiers (as well as email, Jabber, Twitter, and webhooks) and provides a dead-simple API for any web developer to send real-time notifications to their users.

You can think of Notify.io as a web-level Growl system. It empowers users with a consistent, controllable way to get notifications, and it provides developers with a simple, consistent way for sending those notifications.

Notify.io is an open platform for notifications. It’s still in a pre-alpha state, but it already has several useful notification sources. Last Thursday I built Feed Notifier, which uses PubSubHubbub to give you real-time desktop notifications of Atom and RSS feed updates.

At SHDH 35 last Saturday, Abi Raja built a Facebook notification adapter for Notify.io that’s yet to be released. And there a couple more in the pipeline (by me and others) to show the power of Notify.io.

Again, it’s pre-alpha, so before I talk much more about it, I should probably finish more of it. I just wanted to make sure I blogged about it in somewhat of a timely fashion. I seem to have a backlog of blog posts about apps I’ve built recently. However, Notify.io is a pretty significant one. Feel free to check it out, just remember that despite its looks, it’s nowhere near finished — but it does work.

Prepare for posts; I’m speaking at SXSW

Last week I got an email that said my SXSW speaking proposal was accepted. Strangely, my joy was coupled with a bit of disappointed. After the PanelPicker closed, I felt like I didn’t market my talk well enough. That combined with my OSCON proposal being denied, I felt there was no chance I was going to speak at SXSW. However, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the sound of it. I’ve had such a busy year going to conferences, speaking, writing, and building stuff. You all realize this webhooks stuff doesn’t pay, right? I was actually looking forward to not having a huge stressful talk to worry about.

But now I do! Lucky for you, I’ve decided to make it a really great talk. I’ve started work on it immediately and will be developing it probably up until March.

What is the talk? It’s not another “WebHooks are the Future” talk. Well it is, but in disguise. I’ve decided to focus on context. Like I mentioned before, all that vision stuff usually at the end of my talks will come front and center. The talk is called: How WebHooks Will Make Us All Programmers.

In order to describe this, I’ll need to first explain webhooks to those that are unfamiliar. I feel this is getting easier and easier as I gain experience and more tangible examples pop up, like PubSubHubbub and TweetHook. However, I’ll have to take it up a notch further because I won’t have that much time to talk about them. Before I can explain how webhooks will make us all programmers, I also have to share why this is worth doing at all. I have to explain why we should all be programmers.

Yay! It’s a sort of philosophy of computer science. I mean, that’s the stuff I really love talking about, so why don’t I go all out? Well I will.

But I have a lot of work in front of me. I need to finish building more examples. I’ve finally gotten to a point and built enough infrastructure where I can really start showing the power of webhooks through examples. I need to develop a super concise explanation of webhooks, probably something visual and animated — a mini presentation within a presentation. I also need to start practicing speech again. The last time I went without practice it was a disaster, despite getting my point across.

Part of my preparation will involve lots of writing and sharing on this blog. I need to prototype and validate individual ideas before I bring them all together in an epic talk. That’s the only way to make it as awesome as it should be. It also means there will be lots of follow up material for attendees.

So at the very least, my goal is to post something relating to the ideas in this talk once a month. And your feedback will be much appreciated.

Getting webhook callbacks when people click-through links

So I recently put this blog’s feed through FeedBurner. If I recall, I think I wanted to get subscriber statistics, as well as to try out their integration of PubSubHubbub publishing. But since I didn’t think I would get new subscribers often and I’m too lazy to check stats, I really wanted a way to be notified when people subscribed. Since the means of subscribing would be a link, it hit me: click-through webhooks.

I wanted a link wrapper that would trigger a URL callback (aka a webhook) when people clicked through the link. Similar to a URL shortener, you’d just give it a URL and it would give you another URL, but instead of being shorter, it would be tied to a callback that would run as it redirected the user to the original URL. What could you do with this, you ask? It’s a webhook; you can do anything with this event.

Coming back to my original use case, I’d probably tie it to a script that sent me an IM that somebody subscribed. Or better yet, with something like Yapper, I could get a Growl notification. Sweet, right?

I knew it would be trivial to build, and even though it was a feature that I really wanted, it was still just a feature. I thought, it really doesn’t need its own app, does it? So I went to my URL shortener of choice, tr.im, and suggested it as a feature. I also happened to mention to all my friends they should vote it up. Well, it ended up being the 6th most requested feature because of that. I thought for sure they’d implement it. I mean it was so much easier than the others, and I gave them code to help do it and everything.

A couple weeks went by and nothing happened. I got no response. I emailed them and got nothing back. They didn’t even mark it as “under review.” It may have had to do with the fact they were then deciding to shut down … which I hear they’ve changed their mind about. Nevertheless, it still hadn’t happened. And I really wanted to be able to do this notification on subscription thing!

Along came my WebHooks and PubSubHubbub meetup where I wanted to demo this bit of plumbing. Of course, I had no way to do it because nobody had implemented it. So I figured I’d just build it that day before the meetup. Twenty minutes later, I had it live: ClickHooks.

Okay, so that part’s done. How do I get it to IM me? Well, Scriptlets was made to write the glue code to use with these kinds of webhooks. And my project Protocol Droid was made to make it easy to use other protocols from HTTP. So I just threw this little baby on Scriptlets and I was done:

import urllib

payload = {
 'username': 'demo@progrium.com',
 'password': 'secret',
 'to': 'progrium@gmail.com',
 'body': "You got a new subscriber on blogrium!"
}

fetch("http://pdroid.progrium.com/xmpp:talk.google.com/send", urllib.urlencode(payload), "POST")

Yes, that pdroid endpoint is live. No, I don’t recommend using it for production. Stand up your own Protocol Droid gateway. ;)

Anyway, simple enough to understand though, right? It should be. And it was simple to get set up. That’s the whole point of a world of webhooks: you can easily do so much cool stuff if this simple infrastructure is there.

As an aside, later I realized I could generalize my IM scriptlet to use a GET param for the body of the message, allowing me to make a personal messaging micro-webservice: http://www.scriptlets.org/abcdef?body=Hello, world! The data in this URL could then be hidden behind a URL shortener, giving me a regular looking URL that I could then give to people that would IM me the message when they clicked it. Kind of silly, but I almost set up a link that would IM me “At the door!” that people could click from their phone browsers as a doorbell for the WebHooks meetup.

Ah, fun with infrastructure.