Introduction

messagepub enables your web application to start sending notifcations and messages in minutes. There's no need to set up an email server, an SMS gateway, IM bots, etc... and having to maintain that infrastructure. Save you and your developers time and energy. messagepub provides all that functionality in one dead-simple API.Try out the demo

messagepub is a RESTful API that can be used to create notifications and send messages. These notifications can be delivered through several communication channels. The following channels are currently supported: AIM, Google Chat, Email, Twitter, Phone, and SMS (more coming soon...). Each notification can be sent to one or more recipients. For example, a notification reaches Joe on AIM and Mark on Twitter (2 recipients); or a notification reaches Mark on both his phone and his email (also 2 recipients).

messagepub lets you schedule notifications to be sent in the future through a send_at attribute when you create the notification. In this case, the first recipient in the notifications will be alerted at the time you specified.

The concept of escalation with messagepub is key to using it to its full potential. When you send a notification to multiple recipients with our API, you have to provide a position attribute for each recipient. This attribute tells us the order in which you would like us to contact your recipients. The escalation attribute specifies the time messagepub should wait (in minutes) before sending the notification to the next recipient. The default escalation is 5 minutes if you do not specify one.

Let's look at an example. Say you send the following notification with our API:

body =  Do not forget to bring the milk.
escalation = 10
recipients:
         position 1: email, joe@example.com
         position 2: twitter, joe
         position 3: phone, 999-999-9999

In this case, the following will happen:

1. messagepub will immediately send an email to joe@example.com.
2. Ten minutes later, if Joe has not responded to the email, messagepub will send a Twitter message to joe.
3. Ten minutes after the Twitter message, messagepub will call the phone number and read the message when someone picks up the phone (uses a text-to-speech converter).

Note that as soon as a recipient acknowledges receipt of the message, the chain is halted and the remaining recipients in the chain will not be sent the message.

That's all there is to it. Now get started!