The first twitter application with Push notification for the iPhone: Friendfeed + Beejive

by Frankie on June 23, 2009

As you may already know, Beejive pushed a version today introducing long-awaited Push functionality. This got me to thinking about what other applications would benefit from push notification. I suggested that Tweetdeck for iPhone would be one that I would definitely like to see. I reasoned that the group feature of Tweetdeck would make it the killer implementation of Push on the iPhone because I could see my brother’s posts in near real-time delivered to my phone wherever I am, while foregoing the opportunity to see what my favorite celebrities are doing.

With a little further thought I realized I already had all the tools neccesary at my disposal for real-time twitter updates of my favorite people pushed out to my iphone wherever I am: friendfeed and beejive.

Friendfeed allows me to create imaginary friends, therefore even if my favorite twitter user isn’t on friendfeed, I can still pipe his or her updates and see them inline with the rest of the friendfeed gang. I can then organize these friendfeed friends and imaginary friends into different lists. For example, a group called “My Favorite Tweeters.” Friendfeed also allows me to selectively distribute different feeds (home feed, groups, lists, etc) via different means. I simply select deliver “new posts” by “IM” in the header and anytime my favorite people tweet, it is sent on over to my gmail chat.

That is where Beejive picks up the slack. Because I have Beejive set to remain logged in for 24 hours after I close the application, my gmail account is open and ready to recieve the chat from friendfeed. Beejive then pushes this update to my my iPhone via the new feature released tonight: push notifications in Apple’s iPhone 3.0 software. These notifications can be seen as any combination of the following types: badge, sound and alert.

There you have it; the first Twitter client to offer push notifications on the iPhone 3.0 software: friendfeed + Beejive.

  • While push notifications are really nice, I wonder if small-time Twitter app developers have the resources to get them working. They'll have to make an app that runs constantly on their servers and polls Twitter for updates for all of their iPhone app users and then push the notification to Apple. It seems like an awful lot of work, plus the extra cost of a server to keep checking Twitter and send out new notifications. I think Apple really needs to come up with a better system (background processes, anyone?).
  • While I'm not as versed as you in iPhone development, I do agree that small app developers will eventually fall by the wayside in the iTMS. The sheer number of apps has made app discovery a problem, one that is most easily solved by throwing money at it.
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