We’ve just gotten an email from Twitter stating that staffers are testing push notifications amongst themselves and the company will be rolling this feature out to all users soon.
Push notifications would enable users to get instant, real-time updates for certain types of tweets — probably DMs and @replies and perhaps other kinds of tweets, as well.
A few lucky users accidentally got the new feature with the Twitter for iPad application which was recently released.
“When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users,” wrote a Twitter spokesperson. We’ve stopped sending push messages, but users may see an option to turn on push until we release an updated version of the app.”
“We’ve been testing push notifications internally,” the rep continued. “Push isn’t ready yet, but we look forward to rolling this out soon.”
Twitter for iPhone, formerly known as Tweetie, was made available to the public three months ago. Since then, it’s skyrocketed to a top spot as one of the most-used Twitter interfaces. In fact, 8% of all users of Twitter access the app via Twitter for iPhone.
As for Twitter’s official iPad app, which just launched late last night, we don’t yet have any data on how much use that app is getting, but we do know that its interface is exciting and well-designed enough to get geeks around the web pretty excited; stay tuned for our full write-up and review later tonight.
What do you think of push notifications for Twitter mobile apps? Are you looking forward to getting real-time updates from those you follow?
Image courtesy of Flickr, tsevis
More About: ipad, iphone, push, twitter
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