Comment by warwick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by warwick | Hacker News Reader

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I've been working on a little notification app idea. You create an account with a web service. That account gives you a unique email address to forward all your notification emails to (presumably with automated rules) or to just set as your email address on systems that send you notifications. You'd also be able to add RSS feeds.

Between these sources, you build a list of notifications. Then there's a little iPhone app that let's you do six things with each notification:

- Read the full article or email

- Create a new todo

- Add something to your schedule

- Send a copy of the notification to someone else

- Bookmark the notification

- Ask for a reminder (Reshow the notification after a certain amount of time)

This is just something I've been playing with as my fun-hack project. It came about because a friend was complaining that she wished her inbox could be about correspondence, not notification.

That's a cool idea.

The problem with it, though. Is that you'll have to change all your accounts and profiles to this e-mail, then the password reminders etc, come to this address. This address would then become, probably, the most important e-mail you have (so security vaulnerabilities are a extra-big no-no)

Then there's also the added overhead of having to deal with an extra service, simply for notifications that you usually just throw in the trash.

But maybe if it wasn't it's own e-mail address, but that you'd rather have your app connect to the user's e-mail inbox and download, and even delete, the notification e-mails.

Then it could be pretty cool (in my opinion)

Good luck with it :)

I figured that I trust forwarding certain emails a lot more than I would trust handing out my email password to some random web service.

Sounds like an abstraction and extension of Twimailer (http://twimailer.com/). I for one would love a service like this.

I like the idea. Why are online apps not offering personal notifications as a RSS / Atom feed already?

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