One of our blog readers, Lisa Amorao, has posted a blog entry discussing some of the shortcomings of existing notification services, why they don’t work very well for her, and what she’d like to see in Brightkite.
An excerpt:
For the last couple of months I’ve been searching for ways to send out notifications to reach massive amounts of people. Here are factors that I have to consider.
1) I want mobile options. Because not everyone will be in front of the computer at the time I want to reach them, but almost everyone has his/her cell phone in his pocket.
2) While most are familiar with the wonders of the web, I still have to think of the handful of my intended recipients who may still be living in the world of Internet 1.0.
3) I am looking to notify several hundred people at a time. With that in mind, I don’t have the resources to explain things (sign up, how it works, etc) to each one. So it has to be simple enough that even the old school users will get it right away.
4) My intended recipients are more of the LinkedIn crowd as opposed to the MySpace crowd.
Lisa, we’re listening, and hope that Brightkite will address most of the issues you’ve been having with other services. We also have a few aces up our sleeve that we think you’ll like. In the spirit of your post, we’d like to hear from other readers how they think notifications should work. What features do you care about? How do you want to use such a service? Please tell us either by commenting on this post, or by sending us an e-mail.