It's a limitation of the Github API. The app sends notifications after receiving a web hook from Github, and you can only add web hooks for repos you own.
Right, one of the goals of the design is to not lock in any one aggregator. We just need to standardize the server API so other apps don't have to care who they're talking to.
I think notifications will be useful in all our browsers, not just B2G. I'm targeting Firefox Mobile for the initial release since mobile is where notifications fit in the best.
I don't see notifications supplanting Server Sent Events. SSE gives developers a lot more control over the stream since it's connected directly to your server, and you don't have to bother the users with permission dialogs. You'd use push notifications if the user doesn't have your site open, but otherwise SSE gives you more power.
The names of regions and cities come directly from MaxMind[1], our GeoIP service. Some of our localizers provided localized names to replace the phonetic translations, so Russia, France, and Ireland see the real city names.
All of our localization is done by volunteers, so please feel free to contact me if you'd like to get involved.
I don't know exactly what was going on, but we noticed that we were getting as much as 2,000 hits per minute from Alfred, NY. That IP is getting blocked by the load balancer now and I'm working on a way to remove that aberration from our stats.
We worked hard to make it fast in Chrome. Their profiling tools were great at finding some bottlenecks that improved perf in all browsers.
My guess is that we're pushing up against the limits of Chrome's repaint rate when the map canvas starts cranking. That's not as much of a bottleneck in Firefox since there's not a separate rendering process.
I've probably seen that picture before, but it wasn't a direct inspiration. We had a map like this for Firefox 3.6, so glow is a mix of that plus a little WarGames and Tron.
Feel free to email [email protected] (or post here) if you have any other feedback.