Having recently written a piece called "Riding the timeline with widgets" for Vodafone's Receiver, I'm excited by the push-notification model in the new OS release. AT LAST, this means that we can approach the always-on applications experience.
Twitter is an obvious, and interesting example. I don't want to know about Tweets (especially with @pgolding or some hash tag I'm tracking) the next time I run Tweetie, or whatever my latest iPhone Twitter client is. I WANT THEM THAT SECOND!
WAIT A MINUTE! ....
I can hear something.....
Yes, those familiar reverberations of the "don't get it" gang.
They say - "But, you don't NEED your tweets that second, do you?"
Boy oh boy, have we been round this loop a few dozen times. Just like those who used to tell me when I was designing push email systems (BEFORE Blackberry did it - and their 'obvious' patent stung like a kick in the backside) - "Yeah, but you don't NEED push email - you can just check it whenever you want (i.e. using POP3)."
Now, I'm not going to bore most of my mobile-savvy readers with Moore's "Whole Product" story, which is to say that PHONE + POP3 CLIENT does NOT equal useful mobile email experience, which DOES NOT equal whole product. Similarly, Twitter client SWITCHED OFF + iPhone does NOT equal satisfactory Twitter experience.
Twitter is a seizing-the-moment application that works best on a seizing-the-moment machine - i.e. a mobile - when it is ALWAYS ON. Therefore, a push notification service is a MINIMUM level of platform support to achieve the level of ambient communication that Twitter brings.
Now, I am convinced that before long we shall see a whole raft of innovation around the ambient comms theme, what I call communication at the speed of thought. I can think of several apps right now and how sorely I'd love to build them and wished that I still ran a mobile software company with a few developers at my disposal.
I predict that the iPhone OS will soon support widgets that have a fully-fledged "push" mechanism (and programming model) more akin to background processing - as far as that can go on current mobiles without the battery and comms drainage problem. For more on that story, see my slide deck about the real-time future of mobile web.
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