bchi's dashboard

bchi replied on December 14, 2008 06:45 to the praise "How I bought an iphone 3g with notify.me." in notify.me:

Hi eric, I went back to check the time stamp on my email vs craigslist's posting time and found you to be correct. The difference is 15 minutes. I don't have the IM log so I can't verify that one.

The elapsed time is probably due to message batching - a common practice in data delivery systems.

Good luck hunting for the phone.

bchi replied on December 13, 2008 22:34 to the praise "How I bought an iphone 3g with notify.me." in notify.me:

Hi Eric, What's your destination set up for the feed? Email would most likely be slower than IM or desktop widget. I use pidgin for my IM client. It seem to work pretty well for me.

bchi gave praise in notify.me on December 12, 2008 19:58:

How I bought an iphone 3g with notify.me.

Timing is the essence - notify.me provides the edge.

A family member asked me to purchase an iphone 3G in United States recently. Since it is a hot item especially during holiday season, I know I have to act on it as soon as I find a deal.

I checked craigslist to get an idea of pricing on the contract-less iphone sales, and put "iphone 3G 8G" local search string into notify.me for immediate notifications and responses.

I enabled both email and IM notification setting for this particular feed on notify.me. IM notification gives me immediate feed on new sale postings when I'm on a computer, and email notification allows me to reply directly to craigslist postings on my email enabled mobile phone. It was a fantastic experience! I was always the first person in line to inquire about any iphone sale postings.

A couple days ago, notify.me alerted me on a deal with the right price, and at a location near me. I jumped in my car and settled the transaction within half a hour of the seller's posting. The seller couldn't believe it got sold so quickly.

I've always been satisfied with notify.me by getting update-to-the-minute news feeds, but this purchasing experience fostered by notify.me really proved to be an invaluable tool for my digital life.

bchi reported a problem in notify.me on November 14, 2008 19:02:

Malformed links from craigslist feed

I think a similar problem was reported before, but I can't seem to find that thread. Every so often, the feeds from craigslist does not display proper links. I've not noticed the pattern in frequency yet. Here's a snapshot:

Bowei Chi shared an idea in notify.me on October 23, 2008 07:46:

youtube and ebay feed?

A lot of people nowadays have subscriptions on youtube. Is it possible to use notify.me to get updated video links from a subscribed youtube channel?

In addition, I have trouble finding a way to get feeds for ebay search. Any suggestions?

Bowei Chi replied on October 19, 2008 01:34 to the idea "Feed filtering / priority assignment base on keyword / tags" in notify.me:

Thanks for adding feed filtering. It works great. I like to see a couple improvement on the filter add/remove process though I'm guessing it's probably on your to-do list already:

1) Needs a way to edit a filter.
2) Allow removal of include or exclude filter instead of everything
3) I'm not clear on what the "include" filter does. If you don't exclude it, isn't it an automatic include?
4) How about inline filter text edit like this example: http://www.yvoschaap.com/instantedit/ for a simpler interface.

A comment on the problem "Duplicate notifications." in notify.me:

nice! I'll check it out after I get back in town. – Bowei Chi, on September 23, 2008 08:11

Bowei Chi started a conversation in notify.me on September 20, 2008 20:38:

Great job so far notify.me!

I wasn't too big on RSS feeds before, but notify.me really made it easy, and might I say 'fun fun fun' to use. I used to have to go looking for news or bargains on sites like www.cnn.com or www.dealighted.com, but now they come to me. That was very refreshing and helpful. Keep up the good work notify.me, I'm really looking forward to seeing what features you deploy next.

Bowei Chi reported a problem in notify.me on September 20, 2008 16:42:

javascript error in IE 7 on source page.

I noticed a javascript error on source page in IE browser since yesterday. I can not change the sources' alert options. I was using IE 7. No errors from Firefox 3.

Bowei Chi started following the idea "How I got a job using notify.me" in notify.me.

Bowei Chi replied on September 18, 2008 22:40 to the idea "Sorting or Searching feature in history" in notify.me:

P.S.
It'd also be nice to have a statistic view of each feed, such as # of feeds from each source in history, frequency of feeds. If you guys can track click-through of the feeds, add a counter for it, and track the % of successful click-through, and % of ingored feeds. I know it's a bit on the fancy side, but it could be useful to see how successful a feed is, and perhaps have a recommendation feature to introduce highly rated feeds to people.

Bowei Chi shared an idea in notify.me on September 18, 2008 22:28:

Sorting or Searching feature in history

In the "Account"->"History" section, it'd be nice if user can sort the listing by from and time. Perhaps each feed should have its own history sub-section? Better yet, provide some way for user to search through history listings via subject keywords, time, and source.

It'd be useful for people to sort through the feeds that they missed.

You guys probably have this feature on release back-log. :)

Bowei Chi replied on September 18, 2008 17:52 to the problem "Duplicate notifications." in notify.me:

I have a craigslist feed for San Diego Home for sale. I have pidgin as my notify.me agent. Sometimes the feeds are not clickable links.

it seems to only happen to craigslist feed so far.

See pic:

Bowei Chi reported a problem in notify.me on September 18, 2008 16:47:

Error adding a feed.

I was trying to add this feed: "http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techeblog", but it gives me the error: "temporarly unvailable, please try again later." I could access the link directly.

Bowei shared an idea in notify.me on September 18, 2008 04:59:

Feed filtering / priority assignment base on keyword / tags

How about keyword / tag search in feeds to assign feed priority or filtering?

-- Allow users to define keywords or tags that interest them. Perhaps with different levels of alertness associate to different pool of tags.
-- Pre-fetch the content of the feed, parse for keyword / tags. Assign alert / interest levels, and priorities.

Users are definitely interested in certain feeds more than others from the same source. So this will help them be better informed.

Bowei reported a problem in notify.me on September 18, 2008 04:40:

Wrong rss link in tutorial?

I'm not sure if this considers as a problem, but the part of the tutorial where it asks you to add some source, it has the wrong RSS URLs for "news", "technology", and "green".

Bowei reported a problem in notify.me on September 18, 2008 03:56:

Character validation in registration.

Username registration didn't catch invalid characters such as period. It just displays a generic error message.