Live data from Hacker News

Twilio's new Notifiy API

techcrunch.com

11–20 of 21 posts

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#12
From the article: "We want customers to reply to messages because we send billions of notifications per month and every one of those should be an opportunity to start a conversation with a customer."

Billions of notifications per month. That's spam.

Now to figure out some way to reroute them all to the CEO's phone.

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#13

I wonder how this works. Currently there's only a landing page that asks you to request access so I have no idea. Do developers integrate Twilio SDK into their apps (similar to Fabric, etc.)? If so, sounds like a way different model than what they used to do (Basically you could integrate just by calling their REST endpoint since it was SMS based and required no installation of any app, but with APNS the only way I c…

Twilio's problem is that they keep growing in features while being forced to maintain stalwart backwards-compatibility WHILE maintaining documentation AND a ~dozen client libraries for all their developers. While they've made a concentrated effort to improve their documentation / interface over the past year, it's not uncommon for documentation to be out-of-date or incorrect or libraries to be confusing (client.messages.new might call the 2009 endpoint and client.newMessage might call the 2014 endpoint, with only the later endpoint accepting SMS bodies With new offerings like Copilot and presumably this, they get a chance at a fresher start BUT unless you want to handle interacting with Twilio's endpoints directly you're going to have to wait for your client libraries to catch up, which might not be a problem with NodeJS, but for instance my company uses a third-party Golang library that's two years old and has only received minor tweaks in the past 6 months. It will probably not be updated with new features soon or ever, and should I want to utilize these new features I would have to extend or re-write the library myself.

Finally Twilio provides no ways of including metadata in an SMS submission (which is a huge freaking oversight) and makes it very difficult to associate a number with an account. The most accepted answer for that problem currently is to use the Twilio number as a foreign key for an account, which a) does not work with Copilot as you have no control over which number will send the message and b) requires each account to have its own ($1) number, which does not scale.

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#14

I need to build a notifications service for our application, and it would be nice if one of my existing tools like Intercom provided the service instead. I want to be able to send messages of varying levels of urgency - e.g. "send password reset now" vs. "this message should arrive within an hour and can be bundled." The service already has communication details - email, phone, push notification info, maybe even face…

I believe http://lifecycle.io/#/ is doing this. You may want to check them out!

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#15
post #12

From the article: "We want customers to reply to messages because we send billions of notifications per month and every one of those should be an opportunity to start a conversation with a customer." Billions of notifications per month. That's spam. Now to figure out some way to reroute them all to the CEO's phone.

i think you got downvoted, but... why does it have to be 'spam'?

I get dozens of notifications from various services every day, and I absolutely gave permission or requested them in every case. I get spam email and sms, yes, but of the notifications I get... none are spam.

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#16

I wonder how this works. Currently there's only a landing page that asks you to request access so I have no idea. Do developers integrate Twilio SDK into their apps (similar to Fabric, etc.)? If so, sounds like a way different model than what they used to do (Basically you could integrate just by calling their REST endpoint since it was SMS based and required no installation of any app, but with APNS the only way I c…

Hi, I work at Twilio and can answer questions about Notify. Notify is predominantly a REST API you could access through server-side helper libraries in your favorite language. We have SDKs for Notify as well that provide additional functionality (like the ability to notify the user on the device they were last active one.)

To associate a number (or push registration) with a user you create a "binding"

More info here: https://www.twilio.com/notify/api

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#17

I wonder how this works. Currently there's only a landing page that asks you to request access so I have no idea. Do developers integrate Twilio SDK into their apps (similar to Fabric, etc.)? If so, sounds like a way different model than what they used to do (Basically you could integrate just by calling their REST endpoint since it was SMS based and required no installation of any app, but with APNS the only way I c…

Twilio's problem is that they keep growing in features while being forced to maintain stalwart backwards-compatibility WHILE maintaining documentation AND a ~dozen client libraries for all their developers. While they've made a concentrated effort to improve their documentation / interface over the past year, it's not uncommon for documentation to be out-of-date or incorrect or libraries to be confusing (client.messa…

Hi Ben, I work at Twilio with Notify. Thank you for the feedback. We recently started auto-generating our helper libraries (before it was a manual process.) This let's us ship new products and new features into all of our supported languages very quickly. It also opens up the opportunity to add additional languages. I'd love to hear more about languages you'd like to see (sounds like Go is important, others?) and hear more about how you are using Twilio to see if we have a better solution for you. Drop me an email: bchia [at] twilio [dot] com

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#19
APN (apple push notify service): Apple lets you route a push notification to a cell phone

FCM (firebase cloud messenger): Google will let you push notifications to either android devices or iOS through APN, transparently abstracting device differences away from you

Twilio Notify: Twilio will send either over SMS or FCM, abstracting the presence of the app install away from you

I know this is a good thing as software gets easier, and I'm aware that all software works through abstraction, but for web services in particular this seems like crazy nested service glue.

Re: Twilio's new Notifiy API

#20

I wonder how this works. Currently there's only a landing page that asks you to request access so I have no idea. Do developers integrate Twilio SDK into their apps (similar to Fabric, etc.)? If so, sounds like a way different model than what they used to do (Basically you could integrate just by calling their REST endpoint since it was SMS based and required no installation of any app, but with APNS the only way I c…

Hi, I work at Twilio and can answer questions about Notify. Notify is predominantly a REST API you could access through server-side helper libraries in your favorite language. We have SDKs for Notify as well that provide additional functionality (like the ability to notify the user on the device they were last active one.) To associate a number (or push registration) with a user you create a "binding" More info here:…

Maybe i'm missing something but isn't this just like Urban Airship? Basically you need to have an app already in production, and you push through Twilio instead of directly hitting APNS. I do understand the benefits of having a 3rd party manage expired device tokens and sending broadcast push, etc. but having a hard time understanding what's novel about this.
Post reply on HN