I receive a handful of emails a week asking if notify.me domain is for sale. I’m quite fond of the domain and paid over 6k for it at auction 4 years ago. However, I have no plans to use it at the moment.
If you really want it make an offer - quite a bit bigger then 6k.
I will be closing notify.me on the Oct 4th.
I have disabled the ability to add new feed sources today and on Oct 4th I will turn off notification delivery. You may still log in below to download a text copy of your feed lists. This will only be available until Oct 4th so please take care of that as soon as possible.
This is most regrettable news, I have failed to find a business model that can support the service adequately. I’ve mentioned before about a plan to create a subscription however even optimistic projections fall short of anything sustainable.
A spot of good news there are other free services that exist today that could be replacements:
It pains me to have to scuttle the service after so long but its time to channel my energy into new ventures.
After 6 weeks of testing last night we made the move off of notify.me internal RSS Engine and enabled Superfeedr across all our users. The majority of customer should not know much of a difference. Our power users will be very happy though. Notifications will become much more real time, especially for sources that support pupsubhubbub or the other webhooks.
Superfeedr handles broken XML feeds much better then notifiy.me internal engine. If you look back through our getsatisfaction support logs our number one complaint was, “why don’t you support feed X” and the and the reason was that there was a XML error on the feed source.
Over the past 3 years notify.me has been blocked by many sites for hitting their feeds to often. Since superfeedr supports technologies that allow source site to inform them new content is published they don’t have to hit those site nearly as often. Resulting in a better relationship between the aggregator and the content source.
We think this will be a win for both our users and will frees up some of our time to concentrate on more services for you. [Yes, we know you want a smartphone app. But you do know you can use any xmpp app with push notifications. Like these, right?
iPhone => http://www.process-one.net/en/solutions/oneteam_iphone/
Android => gtalk built in people.
This is the final technology we are going to implement prior to transitioning to a pure subscriptions based model. As we start taking advantages of infrastructure and services outside of our control there is a cost associated with that. Arne and I really only desire to break even and pay back past debts on notify.me we don’t expect to turn this business into a massive profit center. We are working hard to get costs down so we can offer a monthly subscription on the cheap. If we can’t get the the price down below what you pay for a venti caramel macchiato then we failed.
Expect a subscription model going into effect sometime within the next month.
For the past couple months we’ve been working hard migrating infrastructure to ec2 and updating our core feed processing pipeline. We now have a full integration into superfeedr. Superfeedr is like our rss backend system that turns rss/atom feeds into message however it works faster and has better feed coverage. This will be better for all. You will be better served with faster updates and we will no longer need to spend our resources on this backend services that has no user visibility.
Moving to superfeedr is our first step towards taking notify.me into a inexpensive subscription service. @sdether and myself are committed to stabilizing and advancing notify.me prior to charging for the service.
Our first step to moving to superfeedr is to remove accounts that are no longer used.
Today we are sending out emails to thousands of inactive account letting them know in about 1 week they will be removed. We have so many abandoned accounts that are taking valuable resources. For instance we process about 500k IM messages a day however we only deliver about ~50k the other 450k are tossed because the IM account is not logged in.
If you received an email and no longer need the notify.me service you don’t have to do anything. We will delete your account in about 1 week.
If you received an email and you would still like to use notify.me then you will simply need to start receiving notifications again via email or IM. To update you account go here.
If you need support go here
Thank you,
Jason Wieland
Today is the day we were supposed to terminate email and text notification delivery. After the feedback we received, we decided to see if we could avoid shuttering those parts of the service and I’m happy to report that we decided that we will continue to support email and text delivery. The overall response to the last weeks blog post was that you would rather pay than to have us be forced to remove features. To that end, notify.me is putting together a subscription model.
It will be inexpensive (under $10/m) and we will offer a special promotion for all current customers, as a thanks for the years of support. We are planning to:
Over the next month we will prepare the subscription service with plans to launch it in late August.
A common question is bound to be if notify.me would offer a free or ad supported version of the service. After looking at the alternatives, we have decided against this. Offering a free version of the site would take too many resources away from paying members. Also over the past two years we have not found an ad-supported model that we’re comfortable with.
Thank you,
notify.me
This is our first post in nearly a year. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, but didn’t have anything that had a visible impact on our users. If you do not care about the last years of events skip down to the last couple paragraphs to find out what changes we are making to notify.me service.
A bit of history.
From May of 2009 we put notify.me on autopilot and started working on extending the service into a b2b product, code named firengin. firengin hooks our notification engine into intranet monitoring products (think nagios and the likes) and be able to intelligently route/escalate notifications to operations teams. We added bi-directional communication so a team of people can effectively chat about a series of monitoring alerts with an integrated event stream. Everything is tagged, archived and indexed for simple search. We added features to automate post-mortem reports, markup/tag portions of the conversation to build a knowledge base, and import into the wiki for reference later. We had discussions with a couple high profile companies and established that there was a market.
After progressing to the 60-70% mark we decided that it would be best to scuttle firengin and shut down the venture. Here is why:
Why did we decide not to just concentrate on notify.me?
It only took a couple months to see that baseline notify.me would be a niche service. There is nothing wrong with the niche server unless your revenue plan dictates that you need an extensive user base. Niche services need to deliver a large value proposition.
Fast forwarding to today, notify.me has seen continued and steady growth. Here are a couple stats I gather up yesterday.
Notifications delivered per day:
Amount notifications clicks per day: 61k
notify.me has been supported mainly by myself http://twitter.com/mp3tricord and sdether http://twitter.com/sdether. We’ve used a couple partners to help support the service which brings me to the crux of this posting. A long time ago I made a promise to myself I would never manage another qmail/sendmail server. So we used an outside company to deliver our 100k email/sms messages. We ended up choosing fastmail.fm because they one of the best email services on the net. Rob Mueller runs a stellar operation and has helped notify.me tremendously. However fastmail’s email service was never meant to be used as a SMTP gateway and after the sale to Opera (congrats guys on that) it looks like they are politely requesting us to stop by the end of the month. So we are planning to do just that.
So what does mean for our users?
The email situation left me with three choices.
To send about 3 million emails a month through the cheapest company listed in #1 is about $2k/m, too much for my budget.
Running my own SMTP server is breaking a long standing promise I made to myself. Life is just too short to manage your own mail service.
Which leads us to discontinuing email and sms delivery. When I started notify.me the idea was to deliver all notification via Instant Messenger services. It was the only way to guarantee a timely delivery. Our IM service uses Xmpp/Jabber because its federated nature meant the extensive base of Xmpp accounts out there could plug straight in.
Unfortunately, even people that have Xmpp accounts often do not even know they have one. If you have a gmail or facebook account, you have an Xmpp account. In addition every user that signs up gets a <username>@notify.me account that can be used via many clients, such as Pidgin, Adium, Trillian, etc. There are also Xmpp clients for most smartphones, which unlike SMS does not incur a service charge.
Our plan is to stop email and sms delivery of notifications on July 27th. After that the only way to receive notifications will be over IM. We do apologize to all the people that rely on email/sms delivery. If you don’t want to use your IM account one other possible solution is to move your email notifications over to feedburner.
Email was meant to get users unfamiliar with IM to use the product and then migrate them over. Unfortunately we did a poor job communicating how to make the transition and we apologize for the rather abrupt 1 week transition that email and sms are now left with.
We got a little too excited about our C# library, we announced it before we annouced our API release … so without further adieu, here’s the announcement for our API release:
notify.me is releasing the first phase of our developer API. The API enables content publishers to deliver notifications into a notify.me customer’s notification stream. In doing so content publishers can reach out to their user base through a variety of communication mediums which currently include instant messenger, email, text messages and a cross platform desktop application in real time. With the use of the notify.me API, content publishers can now effortlessly get their users to subscribe to real time notifications through the notify.me service, as a result content publishers can drive users to their site when new content is published.
Currently the majority of websites support the RSS/Atom standards for publishing content, while these standards provide a step in the right direction for publishing data, they come with some limitations, most notably:
Simply put, RSS is hard to get right. The initial feature set of the API addresses the above problems that content publishers currently experience. With the notify.me API, content publishers can rest assured that their data is formatted correctly since notify.me verifies the data and returns a success or failure when content is published, second content publishers need not worry about dead links, since users are subscribed to an API source content publishers are free to change their URLs without the fear of lossing their customers, finally the API allows content publishers to push notifications allowing their users to get instant updates within seconds of an article being published rather than relying of being polled for updates.
The notify.me application is built on a scalable real time notification engine that processes incoming messages from sources, and not only routes them to a specific user, but it filters them according to a user’s preference and routes them to a user’s destination of choice. The API provides an elegant interface that takes the guess work out of knowing whether a content publisher succeeded in delivering a notification to a user, once the API returns a success publishers can rest assured that the message will reach the intended audience.
We believe the API will really entice sites that are looking to provide a value add to their customer’s experience in which being a first responder makes a difference. Take for example woot.com, they have a limited inventory of items for which users compete, or perhaps stackoverflow.com for which you have you gain a competitive advantage by replying first. Not only does the API address the first responder issue, but it also guarantees the delivery of a message from a content publisher to an end user. We also expect to get some great feedback and suggestions from our user base that have inspired us in the past, so we’re really excited to open up a public inferface for people to build and integrate applications with.
Our company’s focus in the near term will be to complete the implementation of a full featured API allowing both content publishers and customers complete control over their notify.me experience. To see the complete road map for the API, please visit: http://wiki.notify.me/API/REST_API/Roadmap_Draft
Cheers,
-Hani Anani
We’re quite excited to announce the release of the first version of the notify.me API C# library. With this release it should be a snap for C# developers to integrate with our service to deliver real time notifications. We’re just getting warmed up on the API front, we really think this is the way to go and allows for tons of creative applications to be built on top of our platform. So, get all the details and grab a copy of the C# library from here and take it for a spin.
Cheers,
Team notify.me
PS. We’re on twitter http://twitter.com/notifyme
So, the notify.me toolbar has been live for a couple of weeks now, and it’s made some waves, some people dig it as evidenced at hyveup.tv and others .. well, let’s just say weren’t too fond of it. Thanks for you input, we’ve listened and we thought we’d share our vision of the tool bar and let you know how to zap the toolbar if you find it to be pesky. Also, read on if you’d like to help get Seesmic desktop integration with notify.me.
The goal of the tool bar was to provide an interface to manage a source’s setting without having to navigate back to the source listing page. So we pulled all the functionality from the source listing page which includes destination routing, key word filtering and the ability to unsubscribe from a source and added it to the toolbar. Once we tested this functionality out, one of our team members wanted a way to share the link they were currently viewing with their friends through their social networks so we integrated ping.fm and the addthis functionality to the toolbar to make sharing a snap. You might have noticed the modular design of the bar, allowing us to add new functionality … if you’ve got ideas on what we can add to make it more useful, let us know on our forums http://getsatisfaction.com/notifyme
If the toolbar is bugging you and just doesn’t feel right, you can disable it from the settings page by visiting http://notify.me/user/account/edit and checking off the enable toolbar option towards the bottom of the page (be sure to click save account settings for it to take effect)
So the folks over at seesmic have a cool cross platform desktop application which you can learn more about at http://desktop.seesmic.com/. We’ve started a dialogue with Loic over at Seesmic to bring notify.me integration to their desktop client and it sounds like they’re interested but they’re pretty slammed for time.
To demonstrate user interest in this feature we figured we’d start a vote on their forum, if you’d like to see notify.me integrated into Seesmic desktop… If you can spare a second and think this is valuable cast a vote here.
Cheers,
Team notify.me
We’ve been working on some tasty new features over the past couple of months at notify.me, and we’ve just released a few to whet your appetite. First off, we’ve been paying close attention to all your feedback posted on our forum over at http://getsatisfaction.com/notifyme, ton’s of fixes have been made, here are some feature requests that we’ve deployed (keep the feedback coming, we love it!):
on the source listing page On another front we’ve partnered up with the folks over at Ping.fm [http://ping.fm] and 
integrated their service as a destination. So, not only can you route messages to a mobile phone, instant messenger, email and desktop application but you can also route them to all your social networks such as twitter, facebook, linkedin and brightkite through Ping.fm. Think of notify.me as your personal real time super syndicate. We were so excited about this feature that we’ve coined a new term for it over here.
notifipingation: to automatically blast updates to all social networks in real time with the use of the notify.me and ping.fm web service
Read more on how to start notifipinging here http://wiki.notify.me/How_do_I%3f/setup_ping.fm_as_a_destination, also check out the blog post over at Ping.fm http://ping.fm/blog/skype-intl-sms-hootsuite-and-notify-me/
Finally, here’s a link to the official press release
Happy notifipingation,
Team notify.me
