The Missing Service: Notify One Time

There are lots of things I see on the web that are “upcoming,” and I think, “How can I find out when this happens?” Of course, I just could keep checking back to the URL I’m looking at, but I’ll no-doubt eventually stop doing that.

And let’s face facts: no one really wants to give their email to a website. Very few people want to subscribe to all your content, certainly not if they just want to find out about one thing.

What people might want is to be notified when a specific thing happened. For example:

• When Part 2 of a blog post series publishes
• When a specific software update is released
• When a book is finally released
• When new tour dates are announced
• When early election voting opens

For these things, I will give you my email address, only if you promise to use it solely for the thing I want. If you promise to email me that one time about that thing I want to know about and then forget my email, then I’d be willing to give it to you.

That said, this is what I want to see on a website (obviously, this is just a demo/POC, so don’t enter anything here):

Notify One Time (“NOT”), would be a non-profit service. (Maybe? I’m not much of a businessman. I don’t know the best way to organize this.)

As a site owner, I could create an account and register events. For example, when my upcoming book is published. For each event, I would get some script code to embed the above UI on my website.

If a visitor wants to be notified when that happens, they could enter their email address and it that would get sent to the Notify One Time servers, linked to my event.

As I site owner, I could never see the emails. I could maybe get an analytic or two – like the aggregate number of people who had provided their emails, maybe even over some time distribution – but I could never actually see the data.

Then, when my book publishes, I would log into my account at Notify One Time, and “resolve” the event by providing the text of the announcement email (which, presumably, would have an Amazon link or something).

Notify One Time would then send that announcement email to everyone who subscribed. And then… it would delete every email that was provided, irrevocably and forever.

I could then remove the script code (but it would likely have something in it to check the the event was active, and hide itself if it had already been resolved).

The key to this is to get people to recognize and trust the system. If NOT became some known-ish brand and people understood the model, then they would see the logo and know that there was no commitment. They were just signing up for one email, full stop.

Postscript: Preventing Abuse

I know this will be an immediate question: “What’s to stop my ex-boyfriend from signing me up for a bunch of notifications?”

A few thoughts here –

• The risk is low. To do this, your ex-boyfriend would have to find a bunch of pages that have Notify One Time forms embedded. Even then, they are, by definition, only signing you up for a single email to be sent, the contents of which they have no control over, sometime in the future.

• We could require email verification – send an initial email and require confirmation – but I don’t like this as it adds cognitive overhead and could ironically become an abuse vector all by itself.

• What we would probably do if have some heuristic to sense abuse. For instance, if the same email gets submitted many times in the same time period, we could flag it and then require email verification for that particular address.

But, as I noted in the first point, I think the potential for abuse is low, and the threat of material damage is even lower. But I concede that I might just be naive.