blog.notifo.com

Hi Notifo users,

This is Chad, founder of Notifo. I am reaching out today to announce some sad news.

Over the past 20 months, Notifo has tried to be the best notification platform for multiple endpoints including iPhone, Android, Growl, Email, and a few more. Notifo has been my full-time job during this time.

However, Notifo never gained enough traction with publishers or consumers to make enough revenue to pay the bills and sustain it as a company. As such, I have had to seek full-time employment elsewhere in order to pay my own living expenses.

What does this mean for you and Notifo? Practically, it means that I will no longer be working on Notifo. For now, Notifo will continue to run as-is with no further plans for development but will probably be shut down as a result. I will try to keep it alive as long as possible, but please know that it could go away at any moment. I will do my best to provide at least 30 days notice before Notifo is officially shut down.

While Notifo will continue to run in the interim, I encourage you to find alternative methods to accomplish your notification needs.

Some alternatives include:

- Boxcar for iPhone/iPad - http://boxcar.io/

- Prowl for iPhone/iPad - http://www.prowlapp.com/

- SMS with Twilio - http://twilio.com/

- Urban Airship - http://urbanairship.com/

- Xtify - http://xtify.com/

I want to thank all of you for using Notifo. I'm deeply sorry about this result.

There may be a few more posts regarding this situation. Please feel free to email me at [chad at notifo dot com] with any questions you may have.

Thanks for all your support,

-Chad

If you have logged into your Notifo account recently, you might have seen an extra field called Push Email listed on the main settings page. Clicking on that field will reveal a cryptic looking email address — something like username-abc123@push.notifo.com. First off, keep this email private. Anything sent to it will automatically send a notification to your Notifo account. You can setup filters in your email account to forward anything triggering those filters to your secret Notifo push email address. 

There is a brief setup guide setup here about how to setup filters in GMail to forward any types of emails of which you wish to be notified. If you have used our Google Voice SMS push service, setup is similar.  For example, I have setup a GMail filter (this is not just restricted to GMail though -- many email providers let you setup such filters and forward accordingly) that will forward any message from Chad with the word "important" in the title. 

This is an early first release of push email and as such the body of the notification only contains the title of the email as well as the sender's name and email address. Just enough for you to know that you got a new important email and can check your email to load it. We may at some point update it to include part of the email body but our goal is not to make Notifo your new place for checking your email but rather a way to get alerted about new important emails based on your filters. 

Thoughts? Let us know how you will be using this and what other additions would you like to see with it. 

Happy New Year!
Team Notifo

The great folks at Wufoo have just integrated with Notifo! Now you can hook up your Wufoo forms to Notifo and receive instant push notifications on your mobile device or desktop whenever someone replies to your form. All the details can be found on Wufoo's Notifo Partner page and their blog post.

To get started, log into your Wufoo account and head to the Form Manager. Tap Notifications, then select Notifo in the dropdown for sending notifications to another application. Once added, just fill in the Notifo usernames you want to receive notifications and edit the message template as you see fit. (Tip: Click the "API Settings" link to find out what Field IDs you can use. For example: {entry:Field3} )

Or better yet, watch their setup and demo video!

If this is your first time hearing about Wufoo, checkout our Wufoo-powered contact form for an example of what they're known for.

One of the biggest feature requests we receive is to be able to set a timer from inside the Notifo app itself (instead of from the website). Well, now you can!

Just send a message to the 'timer' service under the Conversations tab.

Try it out and let us know if you have any feature requests for the timer service!

Thanks to John Fischer and the great lads at Sticker Giant sticker printing, Notifo has received its first batch of custom cut vinyl stickers! These have already started going fast but send us your mailing address via our contact form and we'll send you one! This is just the beginning of our Notifo swag... :)

Cheers,

Paul

When we rolled out our large iPhone update last month there was an interesting new tab, Conversations. That Notifo feature lets people message other Notifo users with the same lightning quick push technology found throughout Notifo -- entirely for free. Today, we're announcing an update to our API so you can start taking advantage of that. The new messages API page explains how to send a message to any user with your service account.

Here's where it really gets interesting...

User Messaging + Webhooks = BOTS!

Our apologies for the added emphasis, but we think this is going to make a lot of developers jump for joy. Here's how it works:

Specify a webhook URL in your service preferences. Whenever a user sends a message (through the iPhone app's Conversations tab) to your Service Username, the webhook will be accessed by Notifo via HTTP POST along with the entire contents of the message data. You may use the POST contents to create a response to the user.

What can bots do?

Bots accept commands from the user and can fetch data for them, run a process, fire off another script.. pretty much anything. A bot should display a list of acceptable commands when a user types "help" or an unrecognized command. Think of it as an instant, mobile command line. Please take a look at our Bots documentation page for more information on how to start coding your first Notifo bot.

Thoughts? What kinds of uses can you come up with? Please share any of your bot creations with us, we'd love to see what you've been working on!

Another iPhone app has been approved to work with your Google Voice account. This one is called GV Mobile. You can now choose it as your Google Voice app on your GV settings page on Notifo's site.

The official GV Mobile app store page is located here.

So far, the only option to view Google Voice SMS and Voicemail with Notifo was to go through mobile Safari, which was not entirely ideal.

Now, a newly released iPhone app called GV Connect allows you to manage and control your Google Voice account directly from a native app. Notifo has just added support for GV Connect, so when you open an SMS or Voicemail notification, it will jump straight to it inside the app!

You can choose your Google Voice app (Web or GV Connect) in the Google Voice setup page on Notifo: http://notifo.com/user/gvsms

If you haven't seen how to integrate your Google Voice alerts with Notifo, you can read our previous guide here.

See the GV Connect official App Store page here.

See the GV Connect official website here.

(Please note that the app is $2.99 and goes to the developer of the app)

Twitter recently announced their beta-program for a new Streaming API called Site Streams, as reported by TechCrunch here. We are extremely excited to announce that Notifo and Pushly are launch-partners with Twitter for their brand new Site Stream API. What does this mean for you? It means that you get new message types through Pushly that you have been asking for ever since we launched.

These new features go live today!

In addition to the mentions and tweets you already receive, you get 4 great new notification types:

• DMs
• Favorites
• List Additions
• New Followers

and a fifth bonus feature:

• Mentions and replies from protected accounts! (This only works if the protected account has allowed you to follow them)

Because all of these messages come straight from the Twitter data stream, it means they get pushed to your phone (or our new desktop client) instantly! No more waiting around for DM or Follower emails to arrive.

DMs, Favorites, List Additions, and protected mentions are being turned on for everyone immediately. You don't need to do anything to start receiving them if you already have Pushly setup with your Twitter accounts.

We know that some people get a lot of new followers and might be overwhelmed by the volume, so we are leaving those off by default. If you would like to turn them on for your accounts, you can login to http://push.ly/ and choose to turn them on.

Here are some screenshots of what the new notifications look like.

Using Notifo's new "Grouped" view, you can see all of the notification types grouped together, as demonstrated here by viewing all of New Follower notifications together in one place:

We hope that you enjoy having these new Twitter notifications as much as we do.

PRO TIP: Did you know you can use multiple Twitter accounts with Push.ly? Just login and logout of http://push.ly/ for each Twitter account you'd like to use!

Here at Notifo Chad and I take a lot of notes, make lots of lists and always tweak our product roadmap. It wasn't long before we started searching for a large Expo whiteboard for our second office (my apartment). Well I'm happy to announce our search didn't take long at all – we decided on another startup's offering.. the Whiteyboard! Here's a little video of us installing it. 

Hope you enjoyed it!