Fox News Radio

We were approached recently by the Fox Radio News people about carrying the hourly Fox News updates (and other Fox Radio programming) on Foneshow. We happily added their programming (hourly news, Bill O'Reilly, and some other stuff) to our database (you can subscribe here if you like).

An hourly news show brings up a number of challenges to our user experience. Clearly, most people don't want to get notified 24 times a day at the top of the hour that the news has updated. Another issue is since we allow an individual user to define certain times of the day during which they are not notified (black out periods), we need a new way to handle coming out of a black out period for certain series. If you're blacked out on notifications from 11PM to 7AM, you don't want to get the 7 notifications you missed overnight at 7AM.

Essentially we're talking about a different class of series where a new show supplants the value of an older show. The easy answer to this is fixed DIDs, like podlinez, you fix a phone number to a series. But that is an inelegant solution and it doesn't scale well. A better answer is some kind of hybrid of our current dynamic DID system and a fixed did system. If we combined that with more flexibility to the user for handling notification messages then we've got something pretty neat.

We're excited to be working with Fox news on this project and look forward to honing our platform to support the ways in which programmers want to use it.