Email to John Lilly, now a blog post to you
I sent this to JL this morning (in response to his push notification post today) but he hasn’t written back yet and I am impatient for smart feedback so now it’s a blogpost. Anyone want to build this with me in the next few weeks? shd be pretty easy mvp, harder with contextual triggers. holler. Email below:
Subject: You know what’s interesting
i just spent the last hour thinking about push real estate, wrote a bunch of stuff out, and then i opened twitter and read your post. btwn you and me, i think their is a whitespace in push experience as follows:
Premise 1: 100% of push notifications are algorithmically controlled. a rule determines if/what gets pushed to you, and almost 100% of the time it is an engagement mechanic designed to pull you into an apps primary UX.
Premise 2: non-human/explicit intent behind these notifications is inversely correlated to relevance/quality of content (while not preclusive)
Premise 3: there are a set of use cases for which i would grant lock screen push permission to a segment of my graph
i’m not sure what the use case is that i would grant “push access” to my friends, but your “batphone” example is 1.
Another possible: I think apple did a really shitty/non-social job with “reminders,” but i’d probably grant push access to close family and friends to send me contextual push reminders with triggers more nuanced than day/time (i.e. “when jordan is at work, send a reminder to smile” or “when kenny is driving, remind him to grab my sunglasses from the glove compartment” or maybe i’d grant access to my dentist to say “floss you ass hole”…basically i would enable my graph to have lockscreen access for the set of behaviors i know i should do but i either forget or don’t have the discipline to do on my own.
the important part is that the creator of the message or content has the push UX in mind when creating it. Their understanding that the recipient will be engaging with their content through this medium should change the style/context/content of the communication, but there is not an application that’s designed this way that i’ve seen. SMS is close, but dumb on context and only services instant use cases, IFTTT recognizes push as it’s own UX but it’s too broad to own “social push,” and reminders are single player only even though most reminders in my life come form my mother and my sister.
why should IMPORTANT alerts come from applications and not people?
so that’s my thought of the morning. hope you’re good
Jordan Cooper's Blog: startups, venture capital, etc... 
So you want the push notification come from? A seperate app? And received on the notification center? And controlled by what Cues? Time, Event, Location, Transactions?
Richard Weisberger
July 10, 2012
yes to all
jordancooper
July 10, 2012
Makes sense, particually with conditional permission? My girlfriend can push a notification about instances of class notification categories A,C,F but not B,D,E while my mom can access B,D,E but not A,C,F.
Intuitive but elegant CMS.
Ill wire up a flow chart, and send it to you via email?
Richard Weisberger
July 10, 2012
cool. jordan.cooper@gmail.com
jordancooper
July 10, 2012
Are you describing something different from on{X}?
https://www.onx.ms/#!landingPage
RR
July 10, 2012
this is not close to what i’m describing…looks like a ripoff of Ifttt
jordancooper
July 10, 2012