Email notifications are back
For those who signed up later or just didn’t realized, I really messed this one up! I added email notifications for comments and likes a few weeks ago and it failed completely. The comment notifications actually were a cool thing, but you couldn’t turn them off and the like notifications turned out to be super annoying. Here’s some more background on the whole thing.
Email notifications are pretty standard at the moment. You get notified about each and every move from your friends on Facebook, you get notified about new followers on Twitter, new checkins on Gowalla and there are countless more examples from other services and social networks. Some people like them, some people hate them, but after all they are a great way to engage people and build a nice and vital community.
We actually had notifications on Zootool right from the start whenever some user follows some other user and vice versa. This worked great! I then planned to add notifications for our comment system, because a lot of people complained that they never get to know when somebody else posts a comment on an item in their zoo. When I added that feature it really helped to get into conversation and a lot more comments got posted. I then became a little too enthusiastic and added notifications for whenever someone adds an item to their zoo. In this case all of the users who also had that item in their zoo got notified, which meant that up to 80 or 90 mails were being sent whenever someone added a very popular item to their zoo. Not great at all! I quickly added notification settings to the settings window, where you could turn off each type of notifications but I messed this up as well and it didn’t work at all. Being a one-man design/development team sometimes means that the only beta tester for small new features is, hmm, well, you :) and sometimes this just is not enough.
All I can say is that I will be much more careful with new features in the future to avoid stuff like this and I hope that most of you aren’t too annoyed by this after all.
To make a long story short: notifications are back in all their glory and they should at least work the way now they should have right from the beginning. Only the first user who adds an item to their zoo will be notified whenever somebody else likes that item as well and all the email settings will work now, so you can switch that stuff off if you don’t like it.