Last weekend I participated in the first Hack the Midwest, a 24-hour hackathon in Kansas City. I was very impressed by the event: nearly 100 developers from the Kansas City area participated with tons of API sponsors and great prizes. I decided to go it alone and throw my hat into the ring with an idea that I had been thinking of for a while: what if there were email alerts for Netflix Instant? 24 hours later, the result was Qup.tv.

If you're running any kind of service that uses e-mail as a communication method (which is just about everyone) and you want your users to be able to take some kind of action from the email (as just about everyone does) then you should be using Signed Idempotent Action Links. Now I know what you're thinking, "Signed Idempotent Action Links? But EVERYONE knows what those are!". I know, but here's a refresher anyway (ok so I made up the term, but it's descriptive!).