As our daily activities become ever more reliant on access to and interaction with various web services, a growing problem facing a typical end user is that of the ability to streamline and optimize cross-device updates and events originated by web services. A particular challenge is to effectively monitor and navigate to and through the multiple services to which an end user has subscribed to use the desired feature or to access a given update or event. Web with Real Time Communication (WebRTC) services need to notify users and connect sessions, news services alert for news events, sports services alerts for sport scores, stock services alert for stock prices. The assumption of all of these services is that the user has exactly one device that needs to be alerted or, if the user has more than one device, the user will define alerts for each device at the service level. Some notifications need the user to have an active session (e.g. WebRTC). For some devices that get different Internet Protocol (IP) addresses each time they join the network (e.g. laptops), registrations are needed every time a new network address is acquired. Some notifications are sent to persistent addresses (e.g. mailboxes), and others are sent to a device identity whose IP address may change but the network resolves the identity (e.g. smartphones).
For many services that require the ability to connect two users together in real-time, the service is based on the user maintaining current registrations with the service.
Today, most users have multiple networked devices (laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc.,) that may be used at different times. Some of those devices may be shared among several people (e.g. family members) and notifications should come to those devices only when the right individual is using the device. For example, suppose that Grace is a doctor who is on call for consultations from ten separate practices which use separate web-based services to communicate with medical professionals. Each of the services may have a separate unique login and password for Grace. When Grace logs onto the network from any device in the morning, she wants to be connected to all ten services from a single device. If Grace switches from her laptop at home to her cell phone and then to her laptop at work, she may want to inform all ten services to contact her to her work laptop. If Grace has multiple devices registered to all ten services simultaneously, she may want to be able to either have all the devices be informed of incoming messages, or to designate certain devices to communicate with certain services. However, no existing systems provide Grace with a centralized control over the relationship between a plurality of her devices and a plurality of services in the manner described in this example.