2015/MIT/Notifications

Notifications clustering and presentation was a session at IndieWebCamp MIT 2015.

The etherpad was https://etherpad.indieweb.org/notifications.

Notes

Amy Guy aaronpk: Lowest common denominator for notifications is text
Amy Guy ... webmention.io clusters because of flooding
David Shanske aaronpk is discussion clustering
Amy Guy ... in irc
Amy Guy ... when a notification is received it starts a timer, notifications coming in are added to timer and timer is extended for x amount of time
<Kongaloosh> it's interesting, most people check their notifications within a few minutes of waking up
Amy Guy ... if no new webmentions are recieved by the time the timer goes off, it's a cluster, text is created and whole cluster is sent
Ryan Barrett yeah this was subtle and nontrivial to design
Amy Guy ... only similarly typed notifications are clustered
Amy Guy ... that can be combined into a single sentance
<Kongaloosh> and the number of times people check their phones during the day is astronomically high
<neanias> Kongaloosh: one of the first things I do, to be honest
<Kongaloosh> partially by design
Amy Guy ... you want to cluster when one post links to multiple things
David Shanske Notifications are by author or by type, but not both.
Amy Guy ... eg. one post links to many wiki pages
Tantek Çelik aaronpk: you do want to cluster by: source (permalink) of notification (e.g. one post links to many posts)
Ryan Barrett we iterated on this for a while. gory details in https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io/issues/39#issuecomment-123388057
Amy Guy ... also multiple people respond to one post, like rsvps to an event
Tantek Çelik aaronpk: or multiple sources link to one of your posts
<Kongaloosh> that's a good idea
Amy Guy GWG: how to decide who list first?
Amy Guy aaronpk: silos do it based on distance in social graph and amount of interactions. Obviously harder.
Kevin Marks Or one person likes /retweet several of your posts?
Aaron Parecki here's the thread where we were designing this https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io/issues/39
Aaron Parecki here's a bunch of text design https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io/issues/39#issuecomment-127048277

Aaron Parecki uses a rolling timer

when a webmention comes in, it starts a 60 second timer. after that any new notification that comes in before the timer is up increases the timer by another 60 seconds.
notification is sent after no webmentions for 60 seconds.
there is an upper limit of 5 minutes