All the time on the Web, things are happening. Comments are being left, blogs updated, messages sent, tweets tweeted, and so on. If you're an information junkie, then you don't want to know later, you want to know now.

One way of knowing now is setting up a mobile notification app, like Boxcar, to let you know the moment everything happens when you're out and about. But what about if you're sitting at your desk? For that, the company has just released a desktop version of Boxcar for the Mac and the app is soon on its way to a number of other devices and platforms.

The company announced that Boxcar for Mac, a desktop version of the popular mobile iOS app that brings push notifications for a variety of services to your desktop, is available. (Think Twitter, Google Buzz, email, Twitter lists, Reddit, GitHub and several more.) But why would you want a desktop version? Boxcar CEO Jonathan George had a simple explanation.

"We built it because we were tired of picking up our phones all the time to see what messages we'd gotten," said George.

George admitted that, for now, users running both aps will get notifications on both their mobile phone as well as their Mac.

"We'll  get smarter about where we deliver messages as we build out the product," said George. "Since we have a native app on the desktop, we can detect presence. With the users permission, we can discover whether the screensaver is running, how long ago the user last typed, whether or not the mouse has moved. All can be used to create a presence detection system that will allow us to discover where to send the messages to at the right time."

The Mac desktop app is available to download from the Boxcar website and will be available at a later point in the Mac App Store.

Even more exciting, for you non-Apple types, is that Boxcar is spreading its wings and moving on to other lands - Windows, Android and even Honeycomb, to be precise. George says that a Windows version, as well as an Android version, is coming in the next couple of weeks. For you TV fiends, a Google TV just might be in production a little bit on down the line too.

Freak out, Android information addicts - Boxcar will soon come for you too. See?

Version 4.1 comes with expanded Twitter support, a handful of usability updates, and support for Foursquare, Gowalla and, you guessed it, Reddit.

Boxcar 4.0 actually hit the App Store last week with a brand new design and a bunch of new services. Google Buzz, Google Voice, Github and a couple others were all added, as was the ability to reply to Tweets directly from within the app.

We spoke with Boxcar CEO Jonathon George and asked him a little bit about the new services. He told us that Boxcar would begin offering alerts for friends' check-ins on Gowalla and Foursquare, with additional functionality coming in the future.

"The long term plan here," said George, "is to deliver notifications for anything and everything on the web, anywhere you would like."

Nevermind That Jazz, Boxcar Has Reddit!

As for Reddit (our personal favorite addition in this update, if you couldn't tell), Boxcar goes a little bit further.

"For smaller subreddits that don't get much traffic, you can put in the name of the subreddit and a 'threshold'," he explained. "We'll send you a notification anytime a post crosses that scoring threshold."

For the uninitiated, that means that whenever a submission to the social bookmarking site is voted favorably upon by enough people, you'll get notified.

Additionally, Boxcar has notifications for Reddit accounts, meaning you can get push notifications for Reddit messages (or "orangered!", as he put it), comment replies and self-post replies.

The final addition deals with Twitter. Boxcar now lets users get notifications for whenever a user of their choosing tweets. They say something and you know - that simple.

Et Tu, Brute? (What About Twitter Push Notifications?)

Of course, with today's announcement that Twitter would be adding push notifications to its iPhone app, we had to ask George how Boxcar would continue to hold its ground in that realm. The simple answer is that it's a more full-featured, customizable solution, but let's let George speak for himself. He offered five points:

• Find out when people favorite your tweets, retweet you, add you to a list or begin following you.
• Choose from any of our 20 sounds rather than using the default SMS tri-tone sound.
• Use Boxcar with any Twitter client.
• Quiet time for all of your notifications.
• Unified inbox for all of your push notifications.

For the power Twitter user, that certainly beats getting pinged only for @mentions and replies. We're sold.

And if you're on Reddit, well, I'm honestly not even sure what you're doing still reading this. Go get the latest version of Boxcar in the App Store and give Boxcar an upvote, already!

It's important to note that Boxcar is not a fully-featured Twitter client. While you can reply to direct messages right from the app, it will actually open up your favorite Twitter client (you can currently choose between Tweetie and Twitterific) in order to open up replies. In the next version, which has already been submitted to Apple, Boxcar will also give you a choice to handle your direct messages in another Twitter client as well. This new version will also support multiple Twitter accounts.

OAuth Support

One nice aspect of Boxcar is that it allows you to sign in to your Twitter account using Twitter's OAuth implementation, which means that you won't have to give your Twitter name and password to yet another company.

Of course, Boxcar's 5-minute delay is still not quite the instant push that some users would like to see, but chances are that we will see this in the near future. At that point, Twitter could become a real alternative to sending text messages to your friends (assuming your friends are on Twitter and have a phone that supports push messages, of course).

We should also note that IM+ (iTunes link), which is mostly an IM app, but also supports Twitter, can also send push notifications when you receive direct messages and @replies. If the IM functionality isn't of interest to you, however, or if you don't want to switch away from Tweetie or Twitterific, Boxcar is probably a better solution at this time.

Boxcar as an Infrastructure Service

Overall, we think Boxcar is a very interesting solution, and at $2.99, it is also a dollar cheaper than iTwitter. We especially like the fact that, at least at this point, Boxcar is basically providing an infrastructure service and allows you to continue to use your favorite Twitter apps just like you used to.