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Notifications & Watches

A watch is a standing instruction to be told when something new matches a person's interest, rather than requiring them to keep checking for it. New entries are matched against every active watch as they arrive, and a match becomes a notification for the person who set the watch.

What can be watched

A watch can be built two ways. It can be a set of criteria — search terms an incoming entry's title and description are matched against — so anything arriving later that matches those terms produces a notification. Or it can target a single item directly: watching an item this way matches everything that later arrives for that item, with no criteria of its own to satisfy.

What a watch produces

A match becomes a notification for the person the watch belongs to. Watches are matched independently, but their results are not: if the same entry matches more than one of a person's watches at once, it still produces a single notification, listing every watch that matched rather than one notification per match. A notification is also delivered at most once — an entry already notified to a person does not resurface on a later matching pass.

Scoping a watch

A watch belongs to the person who set it, and only they are notified by it. Criteria can also be defined once and shared across a team rather than owned by any one person; watching a shared set of criteria does not notify the whole team — it creates a personal, derivative watch for the individual who turned it on, and it is that derivative watch, not the shared original, that is actually matched and delivered.

When notifications are computed

Matching does not wait solely for a periodic cycle to run. Turning a watch on, and an entry becoming eligible to match in the first place, both trigger an immediate matching pass — so a match that was already possible surfaces right away instead of sitting undelivered until some later, unrelated event forces a full rescan.

Delivery

A notification appears in an in-app list, with a count shown wherever the caller is signed in. Because not every consumer of a notification can carry a signed-in session, a personal feed is also available, authenticated by a per-person token carried in the feed's own URL rather than a bearer token in a header — the pattern a feed reader needs, since it cannot attach one.