The ultimate Notification System

Notifying users of new content, events, actions is something that is common to enterprise level applications, social network or simply a blog. Notification can happen in many forms and via many mediums, some of the prominent ones being e-mail, instant messaging, SMS or live feed. Solutions uptill now have been separate and distant to each other, even though the problem is essentially the same, that is some message needs to be relayed to one of your user. The medium and carrier would differ and so would be the urgency and priority of delivery.

Drupal has many contrib modules which deals with e mail notifications (some 150 odd in mail category) and the community has also experimented with XMPP protocol to tackle the problem of instant messaging. There are few other for SMS integration and nothing for live feed, here in I am trying to suggest to tackle the problem of notification as one group from CMS and application framework point of view. When I write a module I should be able to tag a message as e mail, live feed, SMS or even a watchdog entry and the system should route it to appropriate carrier and medium. I should also be able to define the urgency of the message and the system should be able to put it in queue or let it break the queue and hence forth.

The notification system I am thinking about would be a huge abstraction which would deal with emails, system logs, instant messages etc as same. I'll just need to specify its category and the system would know what to do with it depending on administrator defined infrastructure. My same watchdog message can be sent out as e mail if I give a array of categories. My instant message could also go out as an SMS and hence forth. This I think is the need of the hour to build scalable solutions and applications. I think google and facebook are the only two companies which have tackled this problem completely. I don't know of any open source application framework which does this as well, You always need to bridge things around to get things working.

Scribe server of facebook is one such system (and its open source) http://developers.facebook.com/scribe/.

Benefits - I think if we (drupal) achieve this, then we can readily come into enterprise market and would have very good chances of taking over sharepoint etc. As communication is what they ride on.

Difficulty : It'd be fun and challenging to architect this.

I'll be willing to help achieve this (but maybe not by being a mentor), Any takers?