Notification Services
Posted on July 26th, 2005
I've been thinking lately about notification services, and a recent post on 43folders.com titled On the culture of distraction: one pipe for all interruptions" had a batch of worthwhile insights into the subject. In particular, the idea of pairing notifications with filters and rules.
My interest in notification services comes from an interest in getting new mail notifications over IM. Having one dippy icon appear and/or window flash when new mail has arrived and another for instant messages and yet a third for Skype gets to be pretty annoying after a while. If left unchecked, the typical desktop (Windows especially) turns into a mess of flitty baubles distracting you from the task at hand.
As the 43folders article mentions, consolidation might be the answer. I'd say the first step begins with a personal inventory of all your incoming data streams. In my case that's 2 email accounts, plus Jabber and possibly other IM networks, plus some Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, plus RSS feeds, plus status updates from servers, plus a few other odds and ends. Each one of those sources represents a stream of private information. And for better or worse, each one has its own way of saying, "Hey, look at me RIGHT NOW!".
It would be much nicer to have a single gateway that all those private streams have to come through. A personal firewall, you might say.
One solution might be to squeeze everything through email, but I think this is a bad idea. If your inbox starts filling up with mixed priority messages you have a harder time sorting out the critical from the not-critical-at-all. Email is permanent, but not all notifications necessarily need to be.
I see notifications has having the following characteristics:
- They signal a change of some sort or the appearance of new information.
- They are a pointer to information, not the information itself.
- They're one way.
- They have temporary relevance.
As soon as you deviate too far from those characteristics, you're back to talking about email or something awfully similar to it. Notifications should be treated as something far simpler, the equivalent of someone telling your your shoelace is untied. Either you care or you don't; the relevance is time-limited.
Instant messaging is well suited as the delivery mechanism for notifications because it respects the notion of presence. I recently set up email notifications through a script that connects to my local Jabber server (yes, another adventure with Net::Jabber). If I don't want the notifications, I can set my presence to "away".
Whereas the 43Folders article hopes for standardization in the notification department, I'm not at all optimistic that will happen anytime soon (at least not across multiple vendors). The do-it-yourself option seems like a better way to go, if only for the sake of flexibility.
Next time I'll get into the details of the system that I'm using.