Idea: notify

A bright red exclamation mark in the midst of a number of darkened question marksHere’s one for the Cybernauts: a platform that is able to create a unified notification list out of a variety of sources, including news feeds (RSS), e-mail, instant messaging, Web site comments, discussion forums, etc.

As a frequent Internet user that roams far and wide across the plains of Cyberspace, the thing that frustrates me most is that I keep having to return to sites that I visit infrequently – maybe a news site with an interesting article that a friend posted on Facebook – simply to check whether somebody has replied to a comment I made.

The low-hanging fruit are the existing platforms for which a notification system already exists (RSS, Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, etc.), and on top of that some standard and popular applications such as vBulletin or phpBB, where the app could scrape the User Control Panel.

Ultimately what I want is a big-ass list of all the Web sites and applications that I’ve used, and for the ones which have been updated to bubble to the surface, e.g.

  • Twitter (32)
  • Ars Technica OpenForum (12)
  • Gmail (9)
  • Facebook (7)
  • Hotmail (7)
  • OCAU Forums (4)
  • Australian Frequent Flyer Forums (1)
  • DTV forums (0)
  • etc.

Right now I use 2 programs for this: Digsby, which shows me the status of Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn; and Feedly which is pretty much just a front-end interface for Google Reader, which handles RSS. Neither of these platforms can handle Forums, and Feedly can only handle Web site comment systems that export to RSS (which are few and far between).

It would save me oodles of time having to keep going back and checking various Websites for updates. Am I the only one that has this problem?