Femtoo now with Pushover.net integration for mobile notifications

It was a great shame to see the end of Notifo.com - a great service brought to us by a great guy (Chad Etzel).

However, Femtoo has now integrated another great service - the fantastic Pushover.net mobile notification service.

Pushover charges a few dollars for their mobile phone application, which runs on both Android and iOS devices - but it is definitely worth it. The application itself is very high quality, integrates well and works exactly as it should.

However, what the Pushover app really gives you is a world of up-to-the-minute notifications from almost any source - including Femtoo.com - the web page tracking and notification service (which is free by the way).

If you already have a Pushover account, Femtoo is a really great complimentary 'app', and if you already have Femtoo, the Pushover integration means you can now enjoy web page change notifications on your mobile phone, anytime, anywhere...

Femtoo finally removes Notifo support

After far too much time of wishful thinking, hoping that someone will come and save the fantastic Notifo service, it seems that it is time to admit defeat. The recent version of Femtoo does not include Notifo notifications.

However! I absolutely intend to replace Notifo with something else. There are a number of possibility and your input is very welcome. So please do let me know if you know of a good alternative to Notifo mobile notifications.

Femtoo: 4 years old and over 10,000 users strong

Although the Femtoo blog hasn't seen much action for a while, Femtoo.com itself is seen a steady increase in users over it's 4 year lifespan. Femtoo now has over 10,000 registered users, tracking over 25,000 web pages 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Several server upgrades have taken place over the years with hundreds of code changes (new features, bug fixes and performance optimizations).

Back in 2010 I presented Femtoo at Seedcamp in Barcelona, at which time Femtoo had astounding 700 users! Of course that figure has jumped to over 10,000 in a few years.

Femtoo is definitely alive and will continue to track web pages and notify user for many years to come (and it looks like another infrastructure upgrade will be required due to the continual increase in users).

And for those that don't know, Femtoo is an online web application that allows you to track changes to specific parts of web pages every 30 minutes and get notified by email as soon as a change is detected. Femtoo is used by loads of people for a wide range of reasons:

• checking for product price changes
• checking for special offers and discounts
• checking for new job announcements
• checking for news and publication updates to government or state websites
• checking the local weather for extreme temperatures or warnings
• checking for stock prices or other published financial information

Femtoo is *FREE* to sign up and *FREE* to use. Even the premium features can be accessed for as little as €1.20 per month. Give it a go and sign-up today!

Publishing your Femtoo tracker for Google Docs integration

Previously I talked about the ease in which dynamic web content can be imported into a Google Docs spreadsheet using Femtoo - this simple technique adds a new and powerful dimension to a standard spreadsheet. If you haven't read this, you can do so here: http://blog.femtoo.com/2011/07/build-dynamic-speadsheet-with-google.html.

However, in this blog I will talk about how you can 'publish' your Femtoo trackers for integration with the Google Docs speadsheet or any other application that supports the ability to read data from a URL or web link.

Publishing a tracker and obtaining its unique and public URL is really simple:

1. Login to your Femtoo account (Femtoo.com)
2. Create a tracker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2EaN8aLhLY)
3. Once created, click the pink 'P' button to open the Publisher dialog box
4. Click 'next' to view the 'FURTHERMORE' tab
5. Here you will see the unique and public URL/link for the tracker. This is the URL you can use for the Google Docs spreadsheet integration - or simply as a bookmark for easy access to the tracker content.

 You can test the link by copying and pasting it into a web browser window. You should see your tracker content clearly displayed with no styling or formatting - perfect for integration with other applications or maybe to email to a friend or add as a bookmark for quick access...


This stuff is really cool and shows how Femtoo can be used in lots of innovative ways, although I should point out that at the moment the Publishing feature is only available to SOLO or PREMIUM accounts, which start from only €1.20 ($1.60) per month.

Build a dynamic speadsheet with Google Docs and Femtoo

I have just stumbled across a really neat use of the Femtoo tracker API. The Google Docs speadsheet contains an 'importData' function which loads the contents of a URL into a cell.

So we can take a url like this one: http://api.femtoo.com/trackers/content/?trackerKey=f24b571b7aba172 - which is a Femtoo API URL pointing to the latest BBC news headline - click on it and see...

The next step is to simply use the 'importData' function with the above URL and we would have imported the latest BBC news headline into our spreadsheet. Here are the steps to get live content into your Google Docs spreadsheet:

1. Open Google Docs and create a new Spreadsheet.
2. Click on an empty cell and enter: =importData("http://api.femtoo.com/trackers/content/?trackerKey=f24b571b7aba172")
3. The cell should refresh and become populated with the latest BBC news headline

Pretty cool, eh?

So now everything you can track with Femtoo, you can manipulate in a spreadsheet - product prices, stock prices, exchange rates, number of twitter followers, new software versions, weather reports...

The only downside is that the spreadsheet is not 'live', so although the real Internet values continuously change, the Spreadsheet value is only imported once...but this is something I am currently working on fixing...

If you do not already have a Femtoo account, you can sign-up for free and start creating your own trackers...

Building an open, accessible and event driven Internet

First off, I just want to give my view of the Intenet. I believe there are two reasons why the Internet is successful, or rather why it hasn't yet become just another failed or obsolete technology:

1. HTTP is a brilliantly engineered protocol that has proven successful throughout the history of the Internet (albeit a short history).
2. The enormous amount of careful and hard work that went into developing HTML and controlling 'web standards'.

Although, thanks to the continual attempts by Microsoft to derail and dissolve web standards, I believe we are 10 years behind where we could have been today. Fortunately, the appeal of an 'open' and 'standardised' Internet was so overwhelming that even the mighty Microsoft now find themselves at a disavantaged position having choosen a negative and destructive policy rather than assuming a supportive and innovation led role.

Rather than attack on Microsoft, I would cite this as an example of how little tolerance the Internet has toward anyone attempting to control or bend it for their own profit. In comparison, Google took the opposite view - By helping the Internet become a 'better place', they have become an extremely successful and profitable company and continue to live up to their "Don't be evil" motto.

With regard to the topic of Facebook and the controvasy that surrounds privacy policies and the 'evil empire' etc - I wouldn't worry too much, it would take 30 seconds to register to an alternative social network if people weren't happy with Facebook. We should also remember that over ten years ago we were all signing up to 'friendsreunited' and 'myspace', so gated online communities are not new, after all a social network is just an elaborate forum. I say this because do not like the idea of building an Internet on top of the Internet, I believe it defeats the purpose of the Internet and is largely pointless as HTTP is well-known, well-understood, powerful and incredibly prolific protocol. I had always thought Google Wave was doomed to failure, not because it wasn't an impressive technology, but it simply didn't seem to offer anything new - except a big learning curve.

One of the main motivations behind Femtoo was to make a positive move toward a more open, accesible, event-driven Internet. I'll define these term:

• Open -  Allowing access to lots of data
• Accesible - Prodiving easy, convenient, standard and well-documented access to structured content
• Event-driven - The ability for web applictions to communicate asyncronously with each other via a system of events and callbacks

Why not add 'real-time' to the list? Because the Internet has always been 'real-time'. If I were to publish changes to this blog post, those changes would be reflected on the Internet instantly. The part that generally is not real-time are indexed search results etc - but the 'Internet' can not be blamed for this!

Some core concepts behind Femtoo could be summarized with these sentences:

• Treat the Internet as a rich, accessible database
• Treat a change in Internet content as a single event
• Reference individual parts of a page with a unique URL (not just the entire page)
• Treat the Internet as a single enormous 'workflow' engine.

Ok, but Femtoo is just a webpage tracking and notification system, right? Yes. But I believe it is also an interesting step toward facilitating all of the objectives listed above.

Femtoo allows you to pull out a single piece of data from within a webpage. This single piece of data can then be directly referenced via a single URL, for example this URL always references the latest jQuery version (parsed as a number).

When you create a tracker in Femtoo, have the option of specifying an HTTP Callback URL. So when the tracker detects a change in content (for example a new jQuery version), Femtoo effectively creates an event and fires a pre-configured 'callback' along with the details of the content change.

Because you can track pretty much any textual conent with Femtoo, you can point Femtoo at another web service, monitor the results and fire an event to a 'listener' web service. In this case, Femtoo would almost acting like the 'controller' part of an MVC architecture, but on the scale of the Internet. Futhermore, this process could be one part of a series of 'inter-service' events that constitute an 'Internet Workflow Engine'.

At the moment, most websites are just a collection of static webpage that contain unstructure content. For this reason, Femtoo has to 'poll' webpages to 'artificially' fire events, which is far from ideal. However, if websites were to become 'service friendly' and actively fired events upon content change, then the Internet could start to get really interesting...

Thanks Google - Google Reader to stop change tracking - I said it was hard than it looks!

Today on the official Google Reader blog it was announced that Google will withdraw their change tracking feature.

This is good news for Femtoo.com - the service that provides possibly the most sophisticated webpage change tracking and notification system on the web.

As I say, tracking webpage changes is more difficult than it may first appear - and although Google has given it a good shot, it would seem that some things are best left to the experts :-)

If you want to be notified of specific changes to webpages, try Femtoo.com - it's free, powerful and very cool!