In my last post on this topic I tried to avoid talking too much about the actual details of an implementation of what my ideal notification system would look like. In part because I think that the problem of staying on top of our digital (cyborg?) in a “real time” manner is something that transcends the specific method of implementation. I and many other awesome people have been thinking about this “real time” problem for a couple of years, and mostly we’ve thinking about things like microblogging (think twitter and identi.ca) and XMPP and related topics. These are all important issues that we need to get worked out, but there are issues regarding the use of “real time data” that I think need to be addressed from a more indivudal/user perspective. This notification issue is one of them.

My requirements, in summary:

  1. There should be some common method of creating and distributing notifications that’s easy to setup up and tie into scripts (i.e. with some sort of command line interface.) and that is independent on application. I don’t want notifications from my email to appear in a different place from notifications from IRC, for instance.
  2. Taking the above one step further, notifications should be machine independent. If an event that I’d like to be notified of happens on my server (in the cloud, as it were) or the desktop at home, I’d like to know about it on my laptop when I’m on the road. Preferably, I’d like the system to know if I’ve seen a notification on my work computer before alerting me to it at home, but I’m willing to slide on this one.
  3. I need the ability to filter and control what notifications I see. There are times when I really want to track a particular word or phrase on twitter, and there are times when the last thing I want to know is weather or not someone has said something or other on twitter. Fine grained controls are key. I’d really like to put some sort of filtering pipe intweent “messages received” and “notifications sent,” so I can use it the way I use procmail for email.

Thoughts on Implementation:

  • XMPP seems like an obvious tool for implementing the backbone of this. From my perspective of a slightly-more-than-casual observer, getting one machine to know if a notification has been seen by machines is a bit thorny at best.
  • Notifications need to tie into the window manager and desktop experiences. in some sort of unobtrusive way, but also in a way that is consistent with that window manager normally works.
  • While many notifications will probably be created by sending a simple string to a command, some notifications will probably be generated from RSS or JSON feeds, and the best systems would provide some baked in support for pulling events from these kinds of data.
  • You can get irssi to send xmpp notifications, which is both incredibly ironic, and kind of awesome, as a building block. Also, this emacs-fu for using lib-notify from emacs might be another good starting point.
  • Dumping a firehose of notifications in an XMPP window, might be a good start, but I think once a notification has been sent (and logged and dismissed?), notifications need to disappear forever. Also--and this is the point of the filtering--raw events take processing in order to be useful. The firehose, of anything when exposed to the user, isn’t particularly useful.
  • [insert your thoughts here]

I will, of course let you know how this goes.