The other day ecib suggested to me that he would like to get an email notification when someone posted with a particular tag.
As an example, he said that he wanted all #coffeewithcgod posts emailed to him so he didn't miss them.
Would you use such a function? Do you see any drawbacks to one? How do you think it would be best implemented? Is that just too much functionality?
Since I started the #worldbuilding tag, I check it occasionally to see if there's any new posts in it. An alert might be neat, but I probably wouldn't use it. What might work better would be to be able to "super subscribe" to tags/people/sites, so when a post is made using that tag/by that person/from that site, your little notification wheel lights up with that post title inside.
Not a bad idea, although it seems a bit redundant in that your feed is supposed to serve that purpose. What do you think of the idea of being able to sort your feed into tag-only, user-only, or domain-only content? Another approach might be to select some tags to 'autopin' in your feed.
Ah, but the normal feed throws everything at you at once, and posts jump around and rise back to the top and get all kinds of crazy. The Global feed works strictly on time (I think), but you still might miss a bit if you haven't been on in a while and there's pages of new stuff to sort through. The "super subscribe"-type option would be static in your notification box until you dismissed it.
I think I would like a notification rather than an email.
No. As doing so would mean having to visit two sites rather than just one (I don't like using email for anything but rare occasions). Would much rather have an additional menu option where the feed consists of nothing but tags I've chosen; or, alternatively, perhaps on the profile page when you're logged in it lists in the left sidebar all the tags you're following, so you can click on them individually.
I think tag notifications are a useful idea and I would likely use them. I see them as being far more useful for small, niche tags that aren't as likely to be shared otherwise, and as a piece of infrastructure that's likely to become more important as your userbase expands. Regardless of whether or not you decide to implement them, I'd be careful to keep the ability to implement them in the code.
I like the idea for tag alerts, though I don't know how much I would use it. I would appreciate a Hubski alert more than an email alert. I may use it for #goodlongreads
I still don't "get" RSS feeds. I looked at one on Hubski once, and at a glance it looked like a normal Hubski page with less functionally and a "RSS" template. I don't have the faintest idea how to use RSS properly.
You can use a reader to aggregate a bunch of different RSS feeds together. It also keeps track of what you've read and not read. I use Tiny Tiny RSS, but there's also this, this, this, this, and more. I've been toying with the idea of making my own, too. I aggregate together a bunch of feeds from reddit, youtube, podcasts, webcomics, and blogs, and it keeps track of what I've read and not read (I'm actually super backlogged right now). Now that I've learned that hubski supports it, I'll probably add some feeds from here as well.
Oh! I actually was unaware that Hubski already supported RSS. RSS is the perfect solution for that, and there's already tools you can use to get email from RSS. That having been said, I'd support having an email notification if you decide that it's not too much more added complexity, but I probably wouldn't use it (I use an RSS reader anyway).
Yes, there might be better ways than an email as RSS almost creates that off-site option now. I kind of like the idea of being able to break your feed into tag-only, user-only, and domain-only content, as dashnhammit suggests.