Push notification

Push notification in TwitBird 1.2

TwitBird(Aka iTwitter) was the first twitter client to support push notification.   It was 7th July that iTwitter 1.0 hit appstore. The whole twitter iPhone community was so excited,  iTwitter became a trending topic at its day one: 

Later people find that the push notification only works between iTwitter users. Why this ? 

There are technical challenges to support a large twitter user base for global push notification.  The current Twitter API access has given developers a very hard time to build a stable and efficient push system.  It a lot simpler to build a push client for 1000 users, it is pretty hard to support 500,000 users for global push notification service.    

In that case, iTwitter used a P2P approach to solve the problem, well, partly solved the problem.  When two iTwitter users send each other DM or Mention, as they are in the same system it is a lot more efficient and faster to send the push instantly. 

What's coming?

We are working on V1.2 of TwitBird(iTwitter),  it will have in app purchase for global push notification service.  We will make the service at a very reasonable & affordable price. As promotion we plan to sell the push service at $1 per 3 month rate! It will just cost $.33 for our users to use the global push notification service monthly. We will see how well this is accepted and we may change the price in the future.   

We are currently testing the system to make sure the service will be stable.  Given the fact that apple needs 14 days to approve an app, TwitBird 1.2 probably will hit the appstore around Oct 5th. 

If you have any comments, please let us know.