Push from any client to TwitBird
TwitBird was the first twitter client to support push notification, we are proud of that. There were reasons why we did the push service within the closed community. We can feel the strong demand for push from any client to TwitBird, we have been thinking for this feature for a long time, here is what's in our mind.
Firstly the current twitter api is very limited for push notification. For example say we have 35K users (that's what we have right now), given the fact everyone wants to get DM/Mentions in the delay no more than 2 minutes, we have to build a super powerful server to send request to twitter.com to ask : Please check this user @someone , does he/she have new DMs or Mentions? That's why new twitter client can do the job because they don't have too many users, well for big names like tweetie or twitterrific , it is extremely difficult to build a server system to meet the need to push any DM/Mentions in a satisfying speed, it is simply too expensive to do that.
Secondly, we have a very high piracy rate. Yesterday we had 277 new users registered to our server for push notification service. However our sales at the same day was 38. Pretty big gap isn't it? Only the second day of the new release I can easily find cracks of TwitBird Pro.
So those are the major concerns for us. How do we do with that? We are going to build the push from any client anyway, if users need it users will get it. It is just how do we do it?
Well , it seems to me in-app-purchase for push-from-anyone is a good solution. Only people who really need it will pay for it. and best of all, it is 100% anti-piracy. Our system knows who paid for the service so it is very safe to say piracy will have no room at this situation.
Now there is just one question left for us, how much would our users want to pay for push-from -anyone? Here is some thoughts:
- 3 months service: $1.99
- half year service: $2.99
- one year service: $4.99
what do you think? leave a comment , or talk to us via twitter @twitbird
2 comments:
Not to discount your piracy theory, I use TwitBird Pro for 3 user accounts, one account on my iPhone two accounts on my wife's iPhone. Apple allows one app to be used on 5 devices (maybe 3, I am not sure), provided they are authorized under same iTunes account.
Anyway, it obviously costs money to host server to push Twitter notification and $2.99 base price won't cover both hosting and development costs. Perhaps you can have two pricing tiers. Something like $4.99/year without ads and $1.99/year with ads.
great - purchased your in-app-push, however, test-push doesn't work... wtf?!? rip-off? hope u guys are fixing that, soon!
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