Twitter Pushes Out Instant Notifications

The news cycle in the Internet space these days is interesting in that it seems to have a herd mentality of sorts. There is one group that dominates the landscape for a short period of time, which gets everyone’s attention. In the time that everyone is looking at the most current shiny object (as of late Facebook is that) the other large players have a tough time making waves (Google is announcing a lot of changes but no one is taking real notice) and Twitter has just faded into the news background for now. It’s an interesting phenomenon that is created by the rapid rate of change and the fickle nature of the media and consumers in general.

Having said that, it looks like Twitter is busy in the background doing something. Their blog tells of the introduction of instant notifications that are going to be pushed out to iPhone users.

We want to make sure you see important Tweets even when you’re not looking at Twitter at the moment. To help with that, today we’re launching push notifications for @mentions.

Whenever an account that you follow mentions you, you’ll immediately receive a notification. You’ll know who is talking to or about you on Twitter, and you’ll be able to continue the conversation in real-time. Notifications for @mentions will initially be available on SMS and on the latest version of Twitter for iPhone, which you can download today from the App Store.

I had to chuckle a bit on this one since the term “important Tweets” is used which more often reads as an oxymoron but we’ll save that for another time. Because this update focuses on the @mentions function all this really does is serve the need of the inner-narcissist that many Twitter users have over developed in the past few years. Kind of like those video game thumb muscles that were never intended to be used like they are. God forbid, you aren’t glued to your Twitter feed when someone has retweeted your critical retweet that could end world hunger!

One interesting side note is to see the development order of importance for Twitter. The blog continues

In addition to @mentions, we’re also bringing push notifications for Messages to Twitter for iPhone, as we’ve already done with SMS and Twitter for Blackberry. We’re working hard to introduce this feature to Twitter for Android and Twitter for Windows Phone soon.

Considering the pace of Android devices flooding the market it looks a little backwards to rush to get that done while already having the Blackberry functionality in place.

So that’s the news for Twitter today. I am not sure who is in line next for the complete focus of the Internet media’s attention but for now we are going to have to suffer through a “breaking news” mentality around Facebook and every time Mark Zuckerberg gets a gas bubble. Yay.

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