CloudServices/Notifications/Meetings/2012-06-07

The meeting was a combination of introduction, status and general goal setting for the Notifications project.

In attendance:

   ally, aphadke, dcm, jbalogh, jconlin, mconnor, mmayo

aphadke introduced his use cases which included: Yelp: opt in to daily offers (e.g. lunch deals in MV.) Zynga: opt in to game updates and events. (Mildred clubbed a snake) PageOnce: Upcoming bills due and transaction events.

Notifications is positioned as a potential revenue source for Mozilla, with a fairly rapid growth potential.

Telephonica is also interested in Notifications as a messaging system, but is concerned about data costs on the mobile network. They are working with jbalogh to see what sort of compromise can be reached. Our focus needs to remain on being more "web" than a specific platform. We can work with Telephonica to set up a proxy to handle the "last mile" of messaging to devices.

mmayo raised the following concerns:

• that notifications needs to have a clear federation strategy in mind (even if it's not in v1). This can be addressed by passing back connection URLs in the response data object. These need to be domain limited similar to the way we're handling BrowserID (mozilla.org OR the same site as the notification requestor.)

• that we have proper throttling controls in place for new notification requests. These should be provided via graceful fail handlers and server side controls.

• that we have a sharding/scaling method in mind. Also not needed for v1, but should be something we are actively thinking about.

TODO:

• jrconlin to send dcm track bugs for notifications
• jrconlin to check on queuey load limits and requirements
• jrconlin to investigate potential metric requirements.
• dcm to get Notifications on Aza's radar
• find Ops, Firefox Engineering, UX resources