Friday, February 13, 2009
7 Questions for Notifixious
Over the next few weeks, I'll be profiling several up-and-coming startups whose services I think are really clever and innovative and whose leaders are really making some waves with social apps. Up first: Julien Genestoux from Notifixious.
ABOUT NOTIFIXIOUS
Notifixious is a company that produces Superfeeder, a multiplatform reader service that attempts to harvest any type of content stream at a near-realtime rate. The service acts as a relay for feeds you subscribe to, pushing notification alerts to you via text messaging, e-mail or instant messaging in mere seconds after the source is published.
Superfeeder supports content produced via eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), as well as FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol (SUP), in addition to custom demand-based polling for RSS data.
1. What led you to come up with the concept for Superfeeder?
Notifixious actually needs to notify people as fast as possible when new content is available, so we needed a feed parser. However, parsing feeds is not "smart" enough in most cases since many services exists to detect stories faster. We have then built the superfeeder as an improved feed parser, where we also detect new stories through pusheds streams, ping services, or SUP services.
2. The fact that you're encouraging content creators to release their material via XMPP streams over which you would sending alert notifications via e-mail, SMS and IM is remarkable - but more impressive is that you're also supporting feeds via SUP and traditional Atom/RSS polling. Can you explain your ecosystem for harvesting content?
We actually have a "core" composed of 2 elements: a fetcher that is in charge of fecthing the feeds and the parser, which is in charge of fetching them. Each feed as a fetch "frequency" determined by its frenquency of udpates and other factors. Around this, we have services that "listen" to pushed sources. When they detect a feed that we're already monitoring, they will either take the content (of available), or go and fetch the feed immediately (instead of waiting its frequency). It is actually pretty simple, as you can see.
3. Without giving anything too secretive away, detail your system architecture and back-end infrastructure.
The different components I described above are running on various EC2 instances, which makes it easy to "scale", as we only have to start more instances with more fetchers and parsers.
4. What's Notifixous' business plan?
Ads will definetely be a short-term revenue stream. We are currently looking for the right partners to do so. We have various options for them: a "wait" page, before accessing the link you clicked, or ads pushed to you and that corresonds to your subscriptions. We have other options, but they're not clear enough for me to get into details ;)
5. Obviously, the success of Superfeeder is going to be contingent on data providers evolving their feeds. How do you get sites to go the XMPP route?
We have to admit this is quite difficult right now...however, it is also clear that, at some point, if these services 'push' their content, it starts to become very easy for them to 'scale'. Also, it is a fact that real-time is increasing visitors loyalty and improving the "conversation" factor.
6. What's your short- and long-term vision for Notifixious as a platform? How will the service evolve?
Our goal is to be a notification paltform and basically allow any webservice to notify their users through our service. We also want to be the "single" subscription point for all your subscriptions online.
7. What have some of the challenges been supporting so many different kinds of content in so many different formats and over so many different platforms?
You nailed it : the challenge is to be able to find the smallest common denominator and build around it. Almost every service on the web provides RSS/Atom feeds, and they probably are the simplest API for information consumption. However, the lack of unity and the abundance of protocols, added to the fact that most of them are not valid makes it difficult to extarct the information. Another difficulty is that services tend to not build their feeds with care by putting insignificant titles or worse, by not respecting a few basic rules that makes it easy to understand what the information is about. Please see this post about it.
Thanks Julien! Good luck with your service!
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