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

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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

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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.

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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!

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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

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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!

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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.

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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)

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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!

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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!

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We have been a bit quiet here at Notifo HQ recently but that's only because we've been tinkering on an upcoming site overhaul and new version of our iPhone app (and we even started on our Android app too).  Well we've got some great news today. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, SponsoredTweets, one of IZEA's popular services, has integrated Notifo for instantly alerting Tweeters and Advertisers about things like new offers. 

Adam Fortuna says it best in his post on the SponsoredTweets blog:

One of the biggest reasons that Tweeters miss offers is that they’re not in front of their computer to check. Maybe they don’t check their email, or don’t check their Twitter direct mentions in time, and they end up expiring. We’re hoping Notifo helps to solve this for people with iPhones (and later other devices).

See the full gallery on Posterous

To get started, simply log into your SponsoredTweets account. If you don't have one yet, signing up as a Tweeter simply requires Twitter authentication. Once logged in, just change your "notify via" preference to Notifo and supply your Notifo username. After you update these settings, you'll receive a subscription request on your phone. Approve it and then you'll be on your way to receiving notifications from SponsoredTweets. More setup details can be found on the SponsoredTweets glossary.

Have any feedback or ideas? Let us know in the comments below. 

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Skribit, the service that aims to cure writers block by helping bloggers and publishers receive blog post suggestions, has just added support for Notifo tonight. If you have a Skribit account, just login and head to the "My Account" page. From there you just need to type in your Notifo username, enable and save!

Skribit is registered on Notifo as a service account, so there's no API key for users to setup. All you need to do is accept a subscription request from Skribit before you start receiving any mobile notifications about new suggestions your blog receives. 

Enjoy!

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If you've wanted to write an ColdFusion app with Notifo integration, now you can!

Bob Silverberg has written a CF Notifo API wrapper and written about it here:

Send Push Notifications to an iPhone from ColdFusion

We have also added his code to the Notifo-API-Libraries repo on GitHub.

Enjoy!

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Big news! Paul Stamatiou has joined Notifo as a co-founder. Paul, also known as @Stammy, is well known for his blog and his startup, Skribit. Now, he will also be working full-time on Notifo.

Paul and I both graduated from Georgia Tech (we overlapped by two years). We followed each other online for quite a while, and when I heard he was moving west to San Francisco, I decided to see what he was up to. He said he was looking to work with a startup and was talking with different groups.

I said, half joking, "Why not work for Notifo?"

He said, "Sure, let's talk!"

After some discussions, we decided to make it official.

Paul has joined me in Notifo's sweet Menlo Park garage office (yes, it is actually in a garage), and he's already been cranking out code left and right. He has already integrated GitHub with Notifo for commit notifications (more on that in a later post), and he's almost done with a nice Chrome extension.

Please join me in officially welcoming Paul to Notifo, and check out his extensive blog post detailing his decision to join Notifo (and some other tidbits)!

-Chad

(Photo courtesy of Danielle Morrill, Twilio)

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We are happy to announce that we have been working closely with the Seesmic team to bring you support for Seesmic for iPhone with the Push.ly service.

Seesmic just released their impressive iPhone app, and there have already been several requests for support with Notifo and Push.ly. If you have Seesmic for iPhone installed on your phone, just head to http://push.ly/ and select it as your Mobile Twitter Client:

When you get a notification from Push.ly

Notifo will open your Replies Timeline directly in Seesmic!

We've been talking with the iPhone dev team at Seesmic to help bring you even better integration in the future, so stay tuned.... Enjoy! 

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Now you can use your User account to send yourself notifications through the Notifo API. This means that you no longer have to register a separate Service account if you want to send yourself notifications.

You will need your API Username (same as your Notifo username) and your API Secret. You can find your API Secret on the Settings page. Your API Secret is not the same as your Notifo password. 

Let's pretend that you live a futuristic house where everything is connected to the internet (or at least your home network). Doors, appliances, thermostats, everything... you get the idea. Let's say that you wanted to know about certain events that happen in your house. For example, you want to know when the doorbell rings because you might be in your awesome home theater and may not hear it. No problem, Notifo to the rescue!

Since you are sending yourself a notification, you get to decide what the "Application Label" of the notification is. In this case, it is House, and it is set with a special new API parameter called label which is only used when sending a notification from a User account. The title parameter is set to Doorbell since that is the event that is actually triggering the notification.

Likewise, your refrigerator is cool enough to know that the weight of the milk carton inside is too low, so it fires of a notification to let you know. This time the title parameter is set to Refrigerator.

Got another application you want to send notifications? No problem. Just change the label parameter to reflect the application. Let's say you also have an IRC bot running to let you know when people are talking to you if you are away.

Simple! You can now create all the custom notifications you want to send to yourself.

If you have access to a command line, try this out with your username and API Secret:

curl -k -u username:apisecret \
-d"label=Testing&title=Foo&msg=Bar&uri=http://www.google.com/" \
https://api.notifo.com/v1/send_notification

For full details, please read the Notifo API Documentation.

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Updated 5-24-2010: GMail now requires verification for forwarded email addresses. The instructions below have been updated to include the extra steps.

Updated 9-17-2010: A new Google Voice client iPhone app has been released called GV Connect - read about it here.

We are very excited to announce a new feature in Notifo: Google Voice SMS Alerts! If you are logged in to Notifo, you can click the following link to take you to the Google Voice SMS settings page:

http://notifo.com/user/gvsms

Otherwise, you will need to login at https://notifo.com/user/login and then click the "Google Voice SMS Alerts" link.

Instructions for Setup

Setting up Google Voice SMS alerts through Notifo involves a few easy steps.

Step 1

Under your Google Voice "Settings" page, make sure that the checkbox next to SMS Forwarding is checked.

Step 2

Under your GMail (or Google Hosted Apps) account, add a new forwarding address.
Click Settings and then choose Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
Choose Add new email address... from the dropdown box.

Enter push@gvsms.notifo.com into the text field.
Click Next.

Click OK and Notifo will automatically accept the forwarding request.

Step 3

Under your GMail (or Google Hosted Apps) account, create a new email filter. 
Add txt.voice.google.com to the From field. 
Click Next Step.

Step 4

Check the checkbox next to Forward it to:.
Choose push@gvsms.notifo.com from the dropdown box.
Click Update Filter or Create Filter.

Opening Google Voice SMS Alerts

Opening Google Voice SMS alerts in Notifo is a little different than normal alerts, but here is the general flow:

Step One

You receive a Google Voice SMS alert.

Step Two

When you click "View" it will load inside the Notifo app. Tap it once to highlight the notification and expand it to full view.

Step Three

When you tap the message a second time, it will load the Google Voice website inside the app. Since apps do not have access to cookies from Safari, it will appear that you are logged out of Google Voice even if you are logged in with Safari. Tap the "Forward" button to reveal an options menu.

Step Four

Tap the "Open in Safari" button to load the conversation in the Safari browser.

Step Five

If you are already logged into Google Voice in Safari, you will be taken straight to the conversation view.

Enjoy! Please let us know if the instructions don't make sense or if you have any problems!

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The Notifo v1.2 iphone app is now available in the app store! Download Now!

Some new features:

Edit and Delete All - The most requested feature for this update was the ability to clear out all notifications in one shot. Now there is an "Edit" button which will let you delete notifications individually as well as turn the "Settings" button in the upper right into a "Delete All" button.

You can still delete individual notifications outside of Edit mode by swiping right across the row (just like the Mail app).

In-App Account Registration - Don't have a Notifo user account yet? Now you can register right in the app instead of having to go to the website.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Automatic Refresh at App Launch - Notifo always refreshed itself when the app is launched, but many people did not seem to realize this and manually refreshed the notifications as soon as the app launched, thus doubling the work being done. This update helps prevent the extra work by letting the user know that the new notifications are loading. This makes things speedier for the user and the Notifo servers... win win!

The next version of the app is already in the works, including some UI updates as well as some bug fixes. There is also a version of Notifo coming for the iPad! In fact, I am writing this entire blog post on my development iPad! Notifo works great on multiple devices, and everything should stay in sync, so be on the lookout for that announcement.

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One of the great things about Notifo's API is how simple and quick it is to integrate notifications for your application or website. 

PopularNewReleases.com did just that. In a matter of hours they were
able to add weekly notifications for the top new DVD and Blu-Ray
releases.

So, head on over to their Notifo Sign Up page and check 'em out!

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You can read more in this forum thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203104

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