App.net has introduced an interesting new feature called Broadcast, wherein you can publish or subscribe to "broadcast channels" delivered by way of push notifications. Dalton Caldwell writes on the ADN Blog:

A Broadcast is a new type of message that is always received as a push notification. A user only receives a Broadcast when they have explicitly subscribed to a Broadcast Channel. No “promoted content”, no black box algorithms, just a simple way to subscribe to valuable information that might otherwise get missed in a busy feed or overloaded inbox.

When the notification is opened by the receiver, within it will be any content designated by the publisher, including all the cat GIF's you could possibly want. Photos, text, location information and links to continue reading are all part of Broadcast.

The process of subscribing to a channel isn't the same as following someone on the network, but interested parties will need to set up a new channel for folks to subscribe to. ADN isn't encouraging spamming your subscribers either:

A good Broadcast Channel will send at most 1-2 Broadcasts per day, and most likely even fewer. A successful Broadcast publisher will only publish the most important and high value messages to their subscribers.

A great point, after all, we have RSS to cope with all the noise, and I for one know I wouldn't want notifications with the frequency RSS feeds update. It's a really interesting sounding idea, and one we'll be following closely. The App.net passport application has been updated to get you started with using Broadcast but there's a bunch of other ways that you can find out more about at the source link below.

Does this sound like something you're interested in receiving? Or is this just the thing you've been looking for to add an extra dimension to a personal project? Let us know in the comments!

Source: App.net