Closed Bug 1253290 Opened 9 years ago Closed 8 years ago

Content notifications: Picking sites to subscribe to

Categories

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Product:
Firefox for Android Graveyard
Component:
General
Platform:
All
Android
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: sebastian, Unassigned)

References

Details

In bug 1238087 we implemented content notifications based on bookmarks and known sites. The background service itself is independent from that and could be fed by different sources. Currently known sites are: * medium.com * blogspot.com (Blogger) * wordpress.com The current implementation guesses the feed from the URL (http://medium.com/@Antlam/.. -> https://medium.com/feed/@Antlam/). Based on the timing in bug 1253280 we look for bookmarks of known sites and subscribe to their feeds. Multiple bookmarks can reference the same feed (E.g. multiple blog articles are bookmarked -> Only one subscription for the feed). If a feed is not referenced by at least one bookmark anymore then we unsubscribe from it.
We started with bookmarks because they are a clear indicator that the user somehow cares about this website. And it's easy to implement (Add bookmark -> Subscribe, Remove bookmark -> Unsubscribe). Finkle seemed to be very interested in using history as the source. For this we need to define how we can identify sites the user cares about in history (maybe something like top sites). One visit to a site shouldn't be enough for subscribing. Clearing history would end up in unsubscribing from those sites. But this should be okay. There's a chance of this influencing the top sites: Websites show up in top sites because the user visits those sites frequently. If the user relies on content notifications then there's no need to visit the website until there's new content. But then the website would drop from top sites over time. And then we stop showing notifications for this site. Alternatively we could try to use recent history only: You just visited a site and we try whether you are interested in visiting again by showing you new content. Good candidates should stick because they will show up in your recent history again. Sites with low frequency updates will be filtered out. This has a higher chance of showing content of pages the user does not care about at all (e.g. user clicked random link on IRC). After all we can implement multiple strategies and test them with Switchboard.
From margaret: > Maybe we should look for RSS feeds for websites that users have > saved in reader view, since those are likely to be articles. > To start we could even add telemetry to see how often we can > find feeds for these sites...
Content notification code was removed in bug 1396604.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 8 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
Product: Firefox for Android → Firefox for Android Graveyard
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