Last time we wrote about Notifo, we called it a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything” — and really, that’s probably the best way to describe it. You take your iPhone, install the Notifo app, hook it up to your favorite services (like Twitter, or GitHub) or any of the “Projects” (read: plugins, like Growl alert forwarding, or Chrome-to-Notifo ), and bam! You’ve got push notifications coming down to your iPhone from just about anything you could imagine.
All that notification sending takes two things: users to send the messages to, and a message pushing backend to handle all the heavy lifting — the same two things, as it just so happens, that one would need to create a basic instant messaging service. And so they have.
In an update to their iPhone app that went live this afternoon, Notifo launched a service they’ve had in the making for about four months: free text and picture messaging. Alas, it’s only built for messages from Notifo-user-to-Notifo-user, rather than Notifo-to-phone-numbers — but with all that messaging going on between users and the backend, connecting users with each other was really just the obvious next step.
Notifo seems to be less excited about the user-to-user messaging, however, than they are about something else this outbound messaging enables: bots. Now that Notifo users can send messages back to the backend, developers can build services that can “do anything” at a users command, using Notifo as the message handling middle-man.
Additionally, Notifo has tweaked their Twitter alerts system, Push.ly, to use Twitter’s just announced Site Streams beta, making them one of the first to do so. Wondering what the heck that means? In a nutshell: real-time push alerts from Twitter.
Yep. Now you can learn what celebrities are having for lunch the very second they tweet it out.