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Comment by jolan | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand Notifo anymore. I thought the idea was that small companies would pay for push alerts in Notifo that contain links back to their webapp (or something).

Basically, a universal app until a company-specific one can be written.

I thought things weren't going well. How does releasing a free app help? Are you pivoting?

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pivoting, yes. Notifo itself is still running, and there is a core group of users that love it, but it is almost too technical of a product to get really big the way I wanted.

BlogFire (and another app or so) is a more mainstream app, which will be monetized with some upcoming features I plan to build into the app, but for now I wanted to release it to see if it is even a product that people want, then iterate etc...

> almost too technical of a product to get really big the way I wanted

I can see how it's too developery/B2By.

> BlogFire (and another app or so) is a more mainstream app, which will be monetized with some upcoming features

I'm glad to hear that, good luck!

I'm definitely one of that core group, but since the twitter app started doing push notifications on mentions the only notifications I get from Notifo are ones I send myself from my webapps.

Grantit, I've found those insanely useful, but can see how that's only getting so big.

Me too. I have Growl set up to forward notifications to Notifo so I can get notified when interesting things happen during my work day (machine pave events, automation problems, etc.).

I feel like I'm a bit of a free-rider though, using Notifo's infrastructure without really offering any value back to them.

Are you the guys behing push.ly? Can you make it so that it doesn't request write access to my Twitter stream? I want to use it but I don't see why you need that :(

yes, we're behind push.ly. We need write access to send a tweet out if you decide to upgrade from the default level of following 3 people to 30 people. but we never tweet on your behalf without your express permission.

Unfortunately the way that Twitter's OAuth works, at least when I dove into it a few months ago, is that if you ever want to send out a Tweet on anyone's behalf (for totally legitimate reasons, with user permission etc), you have to request write permission from everyone. And whatever choice you make now, you're basically stuck with, for a variety of reasons. This is why the vast majority of apps decide to ask for both read and write access even if they don't need/want it right away.

You don't have to ask for it from everyone, you just have to know at auth time. If you don't know, I agree, it's a hassle...

write permission is set at an app level, not a per-user level... so asking at auth time is already to late to know.

Nope, you can do it when redirecting the user to the OAuth provider:

http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/gaining-read-only-acc...

Nice! How does that handle upgrading the permissions later? That was one of the big problems I ran into before: that we requested read access and then to get write access we had to have users first revoke permissions and then grant them again (a nonstarter.)

I'm not sure, unfortunately, but I assume that if you log the user in and out, requesting read-write permission the second time, it will ask.

Thanks!

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