MyBitAlert - Alerts when there is a price change [Email Alerts now ACTIVE]

[nightminer]

TL;DR: Wanted a tool to help myself (a total daytrader noob) to see what is really going on in various markets. Made a crappy graph that provided a ton of insight. Made money daytrading. Got p*ssed that I missed some great opportunites. "I need alerts" I shouted in frustration. Busy slapping toghther a project. Not finished yet, but already the data is really useful. Data can be read by a 7 year old. Soon you'll be able to get alerts on your phone where there is a price change.

www.mybitalert.com


==============

Hey guys

A few months ago I minded some litecoins. 2 to be exact. I really wanted to make that money work and decided to transfer it to BTC-E (I know, I know). I did that because they have all sorts of coins and I figured THERE HAD TO BE OPPORTUNITY THERE!

Looking at their interface you could not really see what was going on unless you had the brain of an elephant. I wasn't concerned about prices, I wanted to know percentages. To me it didn't matter what coin I own, I wanted to buy low and sell when the percentage increased above 1% or more. 1% a day is 365% a year, which is not bad.

Here's my original crappy graph:

http://www.mybitalert.com/img/example17.png

Just from that one graph I could very quickly see exactly where there were big price jumps, something you could not pick up by just looking at prices. I learned from this (and countless other graphs, just like this) that you could play the bots. They also look out for drops in the market and it is usually followed by a big jump.

But I missed a few great opportunities. Big jumps of sometimes 8, 9%. I needed some sort of alerts via mail, sms, twitter, whatever.

So I started building it for myself and it turned out to be a pretty great marketable product. It is not finished yet, but I figured I might as well share what I have right now. I don't have candlesticks, I don't have fancy spread graphs since there are already more than enough sites showing just that. My graphs should be seen by a 7 year old, and they should understand it.


http://www.mybitalert.com/img/MyBitAlertMTGOX.png

Not much happening over at MtGox. There was a 2.7% increase in 7 days which is not bad considering most banks offer 2% a year.

http://www.mybitalert.com/img/MyBitAlertLitecoin.png

Poor litecoin took a real beating this week.


I'll be 100% honest in that I want to make some coins off this. Mining is not an option and getting coins are basically impossible. I want to charge a very reasonable monthly price for premium "on the spot" alerts. But I also want free 15 minute delayed alerts for anyone that signs up.

The only thing that can never be free will be SMS alerts, as I obviously need to pay some global network per SMS.

Otherwise, let me know what you guys think. The link is in my signare. Initial thoughts? Suggestions? Your feedback would be appreciated.

[ThatDGuy]

I do really like the aesthetic of the UI, but I'm also a little bit confused initially by the usage of the "Activate Alert" buttons on the right side.  Are these set up so that you can do custom percentage increases in those time frames and then send alerts based on that?

[nightminer]

I'm glad you like the interface ThatDGuy. It's still very rough around the edges, but the data is solid.

You are also spot on correct when saying you will be able to set your own personal custom percentage increases in those time frames.

Real Wold example: lets say you invest a lot of money specifically on Bitstamp. You don't really care about daily fluctuations but would like to know if there is a massive deviation on the 7 day price. You would then click "Activate alert" next to "7 days" on the Bitstamp graph.

The next page will then show you a form like this

Code:

   When the BTC/USD on Bitstamp change by [      ]% alert me

You'll be able to choose a percentage that fits your needs.

In "My Account" you'll have a  "My contact preferences" which will look like this

Code:

   [x]  Contact me via email   [___________]
   [ ]  Twitter direct message this user [___________]
   [x]  SMS this number [___________]
   [ ]   Send a push message via pushover.net using this user key [___________]

Hope this explains it a bit better 

[ThatDGuy]

Very nice, and yes it definitely does explain it better - thanks! That sounds like an awesome service and seems to be one that I haven't seen in such a flexible and customizable manner.  Really cool and looks great - updates here or a post when it's finished would be awesome!

[Maximus-CZ]

Seems nice, but I dont understand. Seems you have actual graphs with value readouts for 1 min, 5 min and so on, and I can activate allert. When exactly does the trigger gets triggered?

[escrow.ms]

Great site man.

[ThatDGuy]

Seems nice, but I dont understand. Seems you have actual graphs with value readouts for 1 min, 5 min and so on, and I can activate allert. When exactly does the trigger gets triggered?

From my understanding of how nightminer responded above, it seems like you can set a percentage over a time and when that percentage threshold is crossed you will get a notification.

So (correct me if I'm wrong!) you can set up a notification if the price changes more than 1% in 5 minutes, for example

[Maximus-CZ]

Seems nice, but I dont understand. Seems you have actual graphs with value readouts for 1 min, 5 min and so on, and I can activate allert. When exactly does the trigger gets triggered?

From my understanding of how nightminer responded above, it seems like you can set a percentage over a time and when that percentage threshold is crossed you will get a notification.

So (correct me if I'm wrong!) you can set up a notification if the price changes more than 1% in 5 minutes, for example

Ag, now I understand, Thanks

[Este Nuno]

Looks good so far!

[nightminer]

Thank you so much for the feeback guys!

@Maximus-CZ: Sorry about the fact that "Active Alert" doesn't work right now. I have been reading the blogs of a lot of clever people with very successful websites they all say "Release early, release often". There's even a wikipedia article about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often

Release early, release often (also: time-based releases, sometimes abbreviated RERO) is a software development philosophy that emphasizes the importance of early and frequent releases in creating a tight feedback loop between developers and testers or users, contrary to a feature-based release strategy. Advocates argue that this allows the software development to progress faster, enables the user to help define what the software will become, better conforms to the users' requirements for the software,[1] and ultimately results in higher quality software

This also explains it quite nice

http://getlevelten.com/blog/julie-miller/why-every-website-should-launch-early-launch-often

This is exactly what I am doing.

ThatDGuy, escrow.ms, Este Nuno, Maximus-CZ. I am making you all honorary members of my site. You get the "Reviewed the site on the forum without any solicitation from me" badge/achievement. You will be premium members forever.    

It's just my way of saying: thank you for taking the time to view the site and giving some feedback. PM me your site usernames and I'll have it ready when the site goes out of beta.

Please note however, as the "badge" says, this is for unsolicited reviews. If someone reviews the site after this post, it is not unsolicited anymore.

Don't worry, I'll conjure up other "badges" or achievements for more free premium membership. Watch this thread!

[ThatDGuy]

ThatDGuy, escrow.ms, Este Nuno, Maximus-CZ. I am making you all honorary members of my site. You get the "Reviewed the site on the forum without any solicitation from me" badge/achievement. You will be premium members forever.    

Very cool - registered a bit ago and taking another look around before sending that.

Two other things I noticed while going through that process and then poking around today:

The password length of 4-11 seems like an interesting choice - not necessarily a major thing, but given the overall level of security that is common and encouraged in the Bitcoin market, is that something that is easily changed to allow a longer password?

The graphs really look great and are a solid representation of data that otherwise isn't readily accessible on other charting sites.  Do you have something in mind for increasing the time scale of the graphs so that they can be viewed over a day/week/month/year or custom timeframe?

As a follow-up to that second point - the inclusion of a time-zone selector for individual's accounts would be awesome, to populate the graphs with.

[nightminer]

Guuuys!! I want to kick myself and wish I could squeeze out 10 extra hours a day to get this finished.

Look at what Feathercoin did today!

http://www.mybitalert.com/img/forum/MyBitAlertFTCGrowth.png

44.66% for one day isn't bad.

The good news is that I'm making progress. When you log in now you can start to set up your alerts

Create Alert Screen

http://www.mybitalert.com/img/forum/MyBitAlert-CreateAlert.png

Alerts Overview Screen

http://www.mybitalert.com/img/forum/MyBitAlert-AlertsPage.png

IMPORTANT NOTE: Actual alerts not going out yet

Guys like I mentioned before, I release features as I finish them. I do realize that the corner stone of this project are the actual alerts going to your email, sms, twitter, etc, etc. I am starting with the immediately, but it is not an easy task. It will take some time.

Sending emails to say 10 users is very simple and easy. You just slap together some code, loop through all the emails that you must send and you are done. It can take up to half a second to send an email or to hand of text to an SMS gateway. So 10 emails/SMSs will take about 5 seconds to complete. No problem.

However, if you have 1000 users who need to get an email/sms NOW, you've got a problem. The last guy in that list will get his email 500 seconds later (or 8 minutes and 20 seconds the be exact). That's no good.

I'll need some sort of mass parallel processing code to make this work. I have already figured out that part and want to run about 500 threads per "notification server". That way, with 1 notification server I can send out 1000 alerts in 1 second, with 2 servers 2000 alerts in a second, etc, etc. I will be able scale with the userbase and add new Notification Servers as needed. I never want to go higher than 3 seconds for all alerts to go out.

I now just have to code all this stuff. My rough estimation is about 3 days. In the meantime you can start to set up your alerts.

Also please let me know if you want to see other exchanges on the system, I'd be happy to add them for you.

Otherwise @ThatDGuy - all great suggestions. I will respond to them shortly.

[calecho]

Great..I will test it and let you know!

[nightminer]

Thank you for some great suggestions ThatDGuy!

The password length of 4-11 seems like an interesting choice - not necessarily a major thing, but given the overall level of security that is common and encouraged in the Bitcoin market, is that something that is easily changed to allow a longer password?

Oops, a very valid point. Upped the limit to 20 characters

 Do you have something in mind for increasing the time scale of the graphs so that they can be viewed over a day/week/month/year or custom timeframe?

Yes. I still need to do a bit of data gathering as some of my data only goes back 7 days. I have written some code to "cherry pick" data points from the past, but I'm not 100% happy with yet. The graphs only look good with between 20 to 30 data points. The cherry picking method won't work, especially in a volatile market. I'll need to group the data in blocks and average it out. Once I have the alerts up and running I would love to revisit this.

As a follow-up to that second point - the inclusion of a time-zone selector for individual's accounts would be awesome, to populate the graphs with.

I fully agree that timezone's would be very helpful to users. I had a look at this when I upgraded the graphs from that original multi-line ugly graph I had. I see that it is possible to ask the browser via Javascript what the visitor's timezone is. My plan is to use that behind the scenes and let the browser rework the data for the visitor's timezone. The advantage is that non-signed in visitors will also see the data in their own timezone.


Otherwise I also plan on splitting up the graphs. Instead of having all the graphs on one big frontpage, I want to have 2 dropdown menu's at the top. Something like

Code:

[By Currency]
  [BTC/USD] -> which will show all BTC/USD from all exchanges
  [LTC/USD] -> same story, all LTC/USD from all exchanges
  [BTC/LTC] -> yep :)
  etc. etc.

[By Exchange]
  [MTGox] -> will just show BTC/USD, but who knows, maybe Litecoin soon (their ticker API already supports litecoin, which says a lot)
  [BTC-e] -> show all BTC-e's info in one place
  etc. etc.

Once again thank you very much for taking the time to give me some feedback. All very much appreciated!

[Rycco]

Hey guys,


I've just developed a new SMS alerter too. It's called AlertCoin - www.alertcoin.com and it's very simple to use it. No registration required, and it's free tool by now.

[nightminer]

Hey Guys

Quick update: Email alerts are finally going out! 


    http://www.mybitalert.com/img/forum/Bitcoin%20Alerts%20via%20Email.png



If you haven't done so yet, you can now start setting up your alerts.

I've built in "suppress alert" support. For example:

If you've set up a 5% change over 7 days on MtGox, you probably only want to know about that once a day. In that case you would set up the alert with a 1 day "suppress alert" option.

If you are into semi daytrading, an alert like 1.5% over 10 minutes would be of more interest to you, and you'd suppress it for 30 minutes.

You can tailor the system to your exact needs, whether you are a daytrader or a long term investor.

Please play with the options to see which setup works best for you and let me know if there's anything I can change.

Thanks guys!


 

[btcminer021]

GREAT UI! I'd love to help try the "beta" when you're ready.

[ThatDGuy]

Sweet - going over to plug in some alerts right now and test it out! Thanks for the update!

[ThatDGuy]

Looks to be running great right now, have had a few alerts sent successfully.

I do like the pro tip at the bottom which explains the nice simplistic interface that seems to function really well.  That said, I tested using fractional percentages which seems to work, but a little bit of UI explanation of that to the user seems like it would be good:



(Sorry for having to use postimg instead of imgur, access blocked there from my location!)

An additional pro tip could do it or a mouseover, but starting off with the grayed out suggested percentage and using something like 1.5% is another way to get the point across to the user what they can possibly put there.

[nightminer]

@ThatDGuy:

Thank you for a great suggestion. I have implemented it the way you suggested, using both the "hint" inside the textbox, and adding a tip at the bottom of the form.

Other than that, I also made a further improvement to the emails going out. Previously the alert only showed the percentage change. I now added the actual values as well. For example, if you set up a 7 day 5% alert on MtGox, you would now get something like this

Mt.Gox BTC/USD just changed by 10.426% in 7 days
Current Price: 134.85248000
7 days ago 122.12001000

It makes it a lot easier to see what is going on.

@btcminer021 - thank you. The system is basically ready to go if you want email alerts. SMS and push messages coming soon!