What do the following have in common?
Weather Channel Max – an iPhone weather app. StockWatch – an iPhone stock prices app. CNN Mobile – an iPhone news app. FlightTrack – an iPhone flight updates app. Tweetie – an iPhone twitter app.
They are all apps which provide users with updates to their phone when some information changes. The information in question is different. But they’re all ways for users to get information that they are interested in, while they are on the move.
Having a dedicated hard-coded app for each type of data is great for information that a large number of people are interested in.
For example, there are enough people who are interested in the weather that it’s worth having an app dedicated to it.
But what if you want updates for information that isn’t so widely needed? What about niche interests?
We’re all different. There is going to be something that you’re interested in that not everyone else is. Or at least a particular set of interests that noone else exactly shares.
People’s needs and interests are almost infinitely varied, so we can’t come up with enough applications to meet everyone’s unique needs. Particularly for more esoteric topics, which are too long tail to each justify a specific mobile app.
For these situations, we need something generic that individual users can customise.
This was an idea I played with on the last IBM HackDay. I managed to get a proof-of-concept working on the day, but not had the chance to share it before now.
What I tried to create was:
- a generic mobile application – something that can display an arbitrary number of bits of information
- a browser extension approach – some way that a user can pick any bit of any webpage, adding it to their list of information that will be pushed to their mobile
I’ve recorded a video of it running. (Difficult to see without full-screen – sorry!)
To summarise, the steps involved are:
- User visits a webpage at their computer
- User highlights a portion of the page, and uses a Firefox extension to register this with my notifications server
- The notifications server informs the mobile app of the new topic of interest
- The notifications server continues to monitor the webpage
- When the highlighted portion of the webpage changes, the updated contents are pushed to the phone
- The mobile app notifies the user of the change
