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.
The biggest problem with a more ubiquitous notification system is that of “signal vs. noise” (which I might add is also a great blog).
For the myspace/facebook crowd, being bombarded with notifications via any medium is fine, but for the LinkedIn, professional crowd, the more ways we can be reached, the less effective each medium becomes as a communications tool–each notification begins to lose value.
So, my biggest feature request is a way for an end user to specify what ‘levels’ and what ‘context’ of messages they want to receive via each medium. For instance, I would not care to have an unimportant bit of information that is specifically web-related to pop up on my cell phone via SMS. But, on the other hand, an unimportant web-related message might be fine to have via email or IM. If you could provide a publisher-defined weight to each notification and provide some way for end-users to flag specific notifications as lower priority than indicated or certain publishers as lower priority, then you could begin to build a notification system tailored to the end-user’s needs.
Pay attention to the user’s ability to filter their incoming messages and you’ll have a winner.
Just my 2cents.
-Ben
I agree (with Ben) that a notification system that gives the user a lot of control to filter would be a winner.
Great comments, Ben. In a future blog post, we’re planning on talking a little bit more about the intrusiveness and immediacy of different notification methods, and how Brightkite will make use of them.
In a nutshell, Brightkite will allow users to build rules that determine which notification methods to use, and some other things. These rules can also take into account certain contexts (time of day, etc.), giving users a lot of flexibility.
As I said above, we’ll talk about this in a little more detail soon.
Martin
I’m glad to hear that user-controllable notifications are a central part of your ideas! I look forward to seeing it all in action.
PS: I’m interested in seeing your integration 3rd party sites/products.
I’m not sure how feasible this is business-wise, but how about sending out notifications via the next-gen videogame consoles? The PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii all have some sort of messaging capability, some better than others. That would be another interesting way to receive notifications that I don’t think has really been done before.