Push delivery technology company Superfeedr today released a new Chrome browser plug-in called Msgboy. (The first 200 people to use this link can get it.) The plug-in accesses your browser's history and uses it to make a big list of web pages you like and feeds you're subscribed to. Then it uses Superfeeder's XMPP and Websockets technology to push new updates from those sources to your browser, in the form of a Chrome Notification. Click the plus and minus buttons in the pop-up and you can quickly train it to know what kind of notifications you want or don't want to see. I've been using it this morning and like it a lot. There are a lot of feeds I've subscribed to that I don't remember to check very often anymore; now they are in the corner of my screen all day.

"The msgboy addresses just that : it sends you the web you care about and stores it in your browser. It's a Chrome application that will silently build a small firehose of all the web services that you use online. It will show you some of these messages as HTML5 notifications."

If you don't like to be interrupted while online, if you need a perfectly polished UI or if you can't handle a little bit of noise until the system is trained, then Msgboy probably isn't for you.

For me, though, this looks great so far. I've now got Growl messages popping up in the top left corner of my screen, Tweetdeck messages in the bottom right and Msgboy in the top right. I am in news firehose heaven.

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?

What may be most notable though is the abscence of new features. Twitter for iPhone got push notifications for @ mentions and direct messages a whole three months ago. Twitter said at the time that it hoped to add push to Android soon, but it's not in this new version. Also missing: any ability to log in to multiple accounts. Other power-user features may or may not come to Twitter's official app someday, but the abscence of official push notifications is a real loss.

Perhaps Twitter aims its own app at the most mainstream of users, the people it imagines mostly reading Tweets from famous people and a few friends or family, and assumes the rest of us feature-hungry types will get our fix from 3rd party apps. That could be a good strategy.

Last September we interviewed a number of User Experience experts from throughout the tech industry about what push notifications would mean for the iPhone. I think the most important response came from Aviel Ginzburg, UX guy at Seattle-based Untitled Startup, makers of Twitter bulk-conversation analysis tool RowFeeder. I think Ginzburg's predictions for what iPhone push would mean to Twitter users have proven correct. Check them out and ask yourself, "ought not Android users be offered this as well?"

"Those of us who have been using Twitter since the days that it was largely (entirely) text messaging driven perceive Twitter much differently than mainstream users.

"Two days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine, who has been on Twitter for a little over a year (tweets everyday, DMs, @replies people, and even owns an iphone w/Twitter for iPhone) and as my phone beeped over and over again, she asked me if something was wrong. I said no, I just get my DMs text messaged to my phone. Her response was, 'you can do that?!'

"She has been using Twitter like people use Facebook, as a way to consume (mainly) and share content in a 'on your own time' fashion. When she uses Twitter, she really uses it, but in controlled bursts when she is physically engaging.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform that will one day replace text messaging, email, and even phone calls. Just look at the Twitter homepage... it's a text media consumption site.

"With the announcement of push notifications, they're bringing the messaging platform core value proposition back to the forefront, and pushing the mainstream, who joined Twitter for entirely different reasons, to experience Twitter in the same way us early adopters do -- as a real-time communication channel that you never disconnect from. The concern of course is: have these users really signed-up for entering a service where the are expected to be available and engaged at all times?

"It may seem like a small and logical update (cut out the text messaging middle-man), but really, Twitter is going to be dramatically changing the way its mainstreams users experience and use Twitter."

We asked Twitter for any details about push on Android. Their response, "nothing to share right now."

Up til now, push notifications for Twitter on the iPhone have been only available via other apps, such as Boxcar.

The default setting for notifications is for accounts that you follow, but you can adjust it for all mentions. Smartphone battery beware. But that distinction is important, as it gives users better control over their notifications.

To set up the SMS notifications, you can go to twitter.com/devices and check the boxes under "Text message notifications." You can also text "set mentions all" to turn on notifications for @mentions from everyone, rather than just those whom you follow, and "set mentions off" to turn off @mentions notifications altogether.

As it's touted as a real-time communication platform, push notifications are an important feature for Twitter to add. Do you plan to activate push notifications for Twitter? And do you think push notifications will change how you use Twitter?

What this means, essentially, is that you no longer need to wait for your news reader to ping your blog every so often to find out if there are any updates - you'll find out in real time.

Just like the adoption of RSSCloud last fall, there is no need to opt-in or install a plugin for a blog hosted on Wordpress.com to become PuSH enabled - it's already active. For Wordpress blogs hosted separately, a PuSH plugin, PuSHPress is now available for download.

This is yet another big step in our progression to a real-time Web. Last month, Google Reader went real time by consuming PuSH feeds, meaning they show up on the news site almost immediately after being published to the originating site. In conjunction, this means that any Wordpress.com hosted blogs, as well as any PuSH enabled blogs running Wordpress, will be immediately available on Google Reader and any other reader set to work with PuSH.

This also means that, if you want to be on the razors edge of what's happening on the Web, you can also receive chat notifications of PuSH enabled blogs. RSS readers can be so last year when you can get a chat notification the instant a piece of content is published.

For a further explanation of PubSubHubbub, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's article from last year's Real Time Web Summit.

Google, of course, already offered this feature for Android users and Blackberry devices. For iPhone users - and especially for business users - this is a big deal, however, as it finally allows Google to offer a feature that Yahoo Mail users were able to enjoy from the day the iPhone launched. It's also worth noting that other services like Nuevasync have offered iPhone users a way to route around this problem for a while already.

It's important to note that the iPhone only offers support for a single Exchange account, so you can't use this new feature to push mail from both a personal and a business account at the same time, for example.

One neat aspect about the RSS alerts from Notifications is that the service uses Superfeedr as its backend to power this feature. Superfeedr, which supports the PubSubHubbub standard, guarantees developers that it will send out notifications about a new blog post within 15 minutes. That's not exactly 'real time,' but close enough for most purposes and during our tests, alerts generally arrived within a few minutes. The Superfeedr blog also features a short step-by-step guide that explains how to add new feeds to your Notifications setup.

If you own a blog, you can also easily add a Notifications badge to your blog that allows your readers to add your blog to their notifications within seconds.

Email

The developers are currently focused on supporting Gmail in the app and your mileage with other email services may vary. To make this work, all you have to do is forward the messages you want to get notifications about (Twitter DMs, Facebook messages, Google Voice SMS etc.) to a personal appnotifications.com email address the service will provide you with when you sign up. Facebook notifications, by the way, will automatically start the Facebook app and Google Voice text messages will open up in the Google Voice web interface in Safari.

Twitter

Twitter notifications are keyword-based. In order to see mentions of your own name, for example, you just have to add your Twitter handle to the search terms on the service's website. In order to receive notifications of direct messages, you will have to use Notifications mail notifications feature and set up a filter that forwards all DMs to your personal appnotifications.com email address.

Verdict

Of course, all these notifications could easily overwhelm even the most dedicated information junkie, so some restraint is definitely in order. Thankfully, the app also includes the ability to set a quiet time, so that you won't be disturbed by new notifications in the middle of the night.

Typically, we experienced a delay of less than 3 seconds before we received a notification, which is better than most push notification apps we've seen lately.

Overall, the combination of Twitter, RSS, and email notifications allows you to receive push notifications from a very wide range of services and allows for a great deal of flexibility. It does take some time to set the service up, though, as you have to set up filters in your email, for example. Most of the setup happens on the service's website, though, which makes things pretty easy. If you need to get push notifications fast and from a wide variety of services, Notifications is the way to go right now and the hassle of setting it up is more than worth the effort.

To Get the Most Out of the App, Set Up a New Gmail Account

It is important to note that while the app is extremely easy to use, it is also somewhat limited. You can't, for example, set up filters so that only certain emails will be pushed to the phone.

To bypass this limitation, we recommend that you set up an additional Gmail account and forward all the messages you want to be pushed to the iPhone to this account. This way, you can use Gmail's own filters to manage which messages you want to be notified of. As the app itself doesn't actually take you to the email client and works completely independent of the email accounts you have set up on your phone, it really doesn't matter which email account it checks.

Limitations: Only One Account, No Quiet Time

The app also supports only one email account, making it even more of a necessity to open up a separate email account just for push notifications.

Sadly, the developers didn't include a 'quiet time' setting, so messages will be pushed to the phone at all times.

Of course, Apple should simply include these notifications in the iPhone by default. However, for the time being, GPush is the best alternative to built-in email notifications, and given that it costs only $0.99, it's hard to say no to such a useful application that will surely be updated with new features over time.

At first, you might dismiss this problem since it only affects a small subset of users, but Balogh brings up an important question: "what should the developers do?" People who have purchased his application are now angry that it doesn't work, yet there's nothing he can do to help them.

A few weeks ago, Apple released their updated mobile OS, the iPhone OS 3.0, which included support for Push notifications among many other things. The two available NotifyMe applications were configured to use the new technology in both the free and paid versions. With these applications, users can receive push messages that remind them of items on their to-do list that need their attention.

Almost immediately after the company released the apps to the iTunes App Store, the support requests began rolling in. Balogh quickly realized there was a problem. Around 80% of the requests were from users who had installed NotifyMe on an unlocked phone. The users were complaining that the app either didn't work reliably or didn't work at all. Unfortunately, there was nothing Balogh or his co-developer Pavel Serbajlo could do to fix the situation.

Says Balogh, the problem involves the Push Notification service:

"...Every Push application has to request the unique token from the Apple's APNS servers to identify the device it's running on. Thanks to that token, APNS servers always know which device is yours. The token can be understood as an IP address -- the server has to know where to send the notification and for which application. APNS can also change your token regularly for higher reliability, so it's critical that the application requests the token again on every start (or when enabling the Push feature) to replace the old one if new token is forced by APNS.

On any unlocked iPhone, the application requesting the token is stuck. APNS does not provide any response at all and the application can either cancel the request completely by automatic timeout or let user wait with the progress bar forever. Either way, the user will never receive any Push message, because APNS has not provided the token."

In other words, if you're running an unlocked phone, you can forget about Push.

What Should Developers Do?

It may be easy for iPhone owners who haven't hacked their device to scoff at this issue: "Well, that's what you get for monkeying around with the firmware!" But the matter is not that simple.

Developers will have to determine how they're going to proceed now that they're aware of this limitation. Should they try to support the hacked phones? Should they just place a warning message in their app's description in the iTunes App Store? Should they ignore the problem (like Apple is doing)? Should they refund the money for the purchases?

Even worse, many of the unsatisfied customers are leaving poor, 1-star reviews when rating the application since they're unhappy it wasn't working for them. That seems incredibly unfair to the developer who has created a perfectly good application that works within the confines put forth by Apple. Yet now, new potential customers - including those content with their unmodified phones - will see these negative reviews and likely choose not to purchase, potentially overlooking great applications that would have worked just fine for them.

Apple's Involvement: Zip, Zero, Nada

Apple has every right to ignore this situation, we suppose, and that's exactly what they're doing. After all, the issue affects only a small community of hackers who have modified their phones. Or does it?

Does Apple have any responsibility to communicate this limitation to the developer community so they're not caught off-guard as Balogh was? After all, it's the developers who have to deal with the fallout - the overwhelming support requests, the unhappy customers, the bad reviews, etc.

At the very least, Apple could configure their APNS (push) servers to return an error message of some sort to let the developers know what caused the connection to fail, suggests Balogh. That way, the developers could at least plan to put a warning message in their app's description to cover themselves against these sorts of complaints.

Does that seem like a fair request? What do you think either Apple or the developer community should do regarding this issue?

Despite the number of iPhone Twitter applications out there, most users have narrowed down the list of clients they use on a regular basis to one or two of the most popular apps like Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitterfon, Twitterific, Twinkle, Twittelator, Tweetsville, or something else entirely. Since these clients already have notoriety and a solid user base, we expected to see one of them emerge as the first Twitter client to introduce "push" technology. Imagine our surprise then when another application, a newcomer called iTwitter, beat out all the rest to achieve this claim to fame.

Having just launched yesterday in the iTunes App Store, iTwitter is a robust Twitter application which offers all the features you would expect including access to your friends' timeline, direct messages, mentions (@ replies), favorites, following and follower lists, and a compose screen. Plus, it also throws in several extra features that may put it one notch above your current favorite app like its ability to display nearby tweets, integration with TwitPic (including an inline viewer), a fast re-tweet option, a landscape keyboard, custom searches and the ability to save them, and conversational threaded tweets.

Here Comes Pushed Tweets!

However, the feature which everyone cares about is not currently listed in the app's description on its iTunes page: PUSH. But a few hours ago, the app's dev team tweeted the big news: "iTwitter push notification is working perfectly now, enjoy it guys!"

The pushed messages arrive as pop-up messages on your homescreen, just like they do in other push-enabled applications like instant messaging clients Beejive and IM+. You can choose to "close" the notification message or you can tap "view" to launch iTwitter and view the tweet.

Unfortunately, there is a drawback to the way iTwitter implements the push technology. It pushes all mentions and direct messages...but only if the person sending them is using iTwitter, too. Sigh. So close, yet so far. We don't know why they would implement such a serious restriction and it is quite the disappointment. We guess the only way to work around this issue is to convince all our friends to ditch their current app and start using iTwitter instead.

At the moment, iTwitter is free, but if it remains the only available push client for too long, it wouldn't be a surprise if they started charging. Better grab it now just in case!

Update: As one commenter noted below, iTwitter isn't technically the first app to implement push Twitter messages - IM+ is. However, IM+ is more well-known as an instant messaging client, not as a standalone Twitter client. iTwitter is the first Twitter-only client to do push, an important distinction since many people prefer using a dedicated app with a lot more features.

We got a chance to test the app out for the last few weeks, and the app does indeed make great use of the iPhone's ability to receive push notifications. This finally makes third-party calendars on the iPhone useful, and reQall is one of the first calendar/to-do list apps to make really good use of this feature.

One of reQall's best features is that it can turn voice memos and free-style notes like "meeting with Marshall at 2pm on Friday" into formatted text and enter these as appointments into your reQall calendar. The voice transcriptions were generally spot-on.

The big difference with the old version of reQall is that you will now actually get an alert pushed to the phone that reminds you of that appointment you just dictated into your phone. Before, if you used the free version, you had to open up the app, and what's the chance of a user actually doing that?

In the pro version, reQall already sent out SMS alerts, but now, even the free version of the app can send out push notifications. We have seen quite a few IM apps that used push well, but this is the first time that we have encountered an application that makes really good use of push notifications, but isn't an IM app.

Correction: reQall just told us that the free version will not support push notifications.

Locations

One of the apps' coolest features (though restricted to the pro version) is that you can also assign locations to tasks. Sadly, though, because developers can't wake up apps remotely and get a user's location without the app running, the app still has to be running for this feature to work well. You can, however, bring up a map and see nearby places that also have reminders attached to them.

The pro version of ReQall also nicely integrates with your contacts, which allows you to easily make calls or send emails right from your list of reminders.

Pro Version

To get the most out of reQall, however, you really need a paid account. For $2.99 a month, which is not a major expense, you also get great features like easier voice memo recording by simply holding the phone to your ear (similar to how the Google Mobile app works on the iPhone), reminders by SMS, and access to a more fully-featured "memory jogger' function, which tries to remind you of items that you might just have forgotten otherwise. For professional users, the integration with Outlook is probably also another must-have feature that is only available in the pro version.

The exact differences are a bit complicated, but reQall provides its users with a nice table that lists all the differences.

Even the free version provides great features, and now that the app's pro version supports push notifications, it can finally live up to its promise.

BeeJive, for example, is a great IM app - and so are eBuddy (iTunes link) and IM+ with Push (iTunes link), two other push-enabled IM apps that were released in the last few days. These apps are intuitive, connect to most popular IM networks, and work just as advertised. But when it comes to push notifications, there are just too many little things that are holding these apps back.

By default, BeeJive, for example, will log you out of your account after just 20 minutes. So once you have finished a chat session, you will just be offline again and no new messages will be pushed to your phone. You can push this timeout limit up to 24 hours, but this setting is buried at the bottom of BeeJive's long list of options. The eBuddy IM app doesn't even have this option and just automatically logs you out after 30 minutes.

There are probably good technical reasons for this, but this behavior just isn't what we expected when we first heard about push notifications.

News Updates are Nice, but What About Customization?

While the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) does push out news updates regularly, it is also a bit of a letdown. There is, for example, no way to customize when you want to get alerts and which alerts you want to get. You can't just subscribe to tech news, for example, or updates about the latest celebrity deaths.

Still no Twitter Apps with Push

We are also still waiting for the first Twitter apps that support push (at least for replies and direct messages), better calendar apps (Remember Milk is the only one in the App Store so far, and it requires a pro account), apps that can push out alerts when an RSS feed updates or when new email arrives, or apps that are simply innovative and beyond our current exepctations.

Maybe Push Just Isn't the Solution?

While getting the current updates is nice, compared to having to open the app and see what is new, there is so much more that could be done with this technology. But for the time being, either Apple is holding back the most interesting apps, or developers just aren't able to use it in really innovative ideas.

We have talked to a number of companies that are producing geo-aware apps, for example. But because these developers aren't able to remotely wake up an app and pull in data about your current location, there really isn't much that they can do with push notifications at this point.

If only the phone could also run cron jobs, for example. Then that could start an application at regular intervals, in addition to push notifications, and developers could do so much more with this technology.

Of course, we are still in the early days of push on the iPhone, but so far, we have been quite disappointed with the current crop of apps. Hopefully, this will only be a stopgap solution anyway, and by the time the next generation of iPhones comes around, Apple will just allow apps to run in the background.

We got a chance to test both apps and both work just as advertised. For the AIM app, for example, the delay between sending a message and a notification popping up on our phone was usually under five seconds and sometimes almost instantaneous. Push, by the way, is enabled both for the free AIM app, which features ads, and the $2.99 paid version which is ad-free. One problem we noticed, though (and the same goes for the Associated Press news app with push), was that clicking on 'view' in a pop-up notification only open the app, but didn't take us to the actual message. We almost wonder if this is something Apple's API doesn't support, as this seems to be common among the push apps we have seen so far.

BeejiveIM is a bit pricey at $9.99, and the price might go up to $15.99 later, so if you really want this app, which supports, Windows Live, AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace, ICQ, and the Jabber protocol, not is probably the time to buy it. The one IM protocol this app misses support for Skype chats, though we are hoping for IM+ with support for push notifications (iTunes link to the free version) to be allowed into the store in the next few days.

Finally!

We are very excited to see the first new batch of push notifications in the App Store, though we would still like Apple to make a few changes to the way the iPhone handles these messages (including the ability to set a 'quiet time' during which notification are ignored). However, as long as Apple doesn't allow applications to run in the background, push notifications are the best alternatives and we are looking forward to seeing what developers will do with this new feature.

After thinking about how Apple has implemented notifications, however, we think that while this is a great feature, there are a couple of areas where we would like to see some changes.

For one, there doesn't seem to be an option to review which notifications have come in after dismissing them. So if you mistakenly close a notification instead of clicking on 'View,' there is no way to go back to see where the message came from. It would be nice if Apple could include a list of incoming push notifications somewhere - maybe even under the generically named 'Messages' icon where the SMS features now reside.

No Quiet Time

Another issue that doesn't seem so pressing on a Thursday morning, but might become a problem by Thursday night, is that there is no way to set a 'quiet time' for push notifications. If you only want notifications during the day, but not at night, you will have to turn off notifications completely in settings. Sure, you could just turn off all sounds and maybe rely solely on badges, so you won't be startled by a breaking news alert from the AP at 3am, but that would defeat the purpose.

We Still Love Push

We assume that developers might be able to add some of these features themselves, but it would have been nice if Apple had included this itself. These gripes aside, though, we think that push is going to be a major game changer and can't wait for more apps to support it (especially more Twitter clients and IM apps).

Note: We will look at Apple's push notifications from a developer's perspective later today.

Push Enabled Apps

If you are looking for a list of push enabled apps, by the way, the good people at AppAdvice feature a nice list of currently available apps, as well as some that should hit the App Store soon.

Recently, a video of instant-messaging application BeejiveIM appeared on YouTube, giving us a sneak peek of the push notification feature in action.

After moving the slider to unlock the phone, the BeejiveIM application appears - you don't have to flip through screens to locate the app and launch it! That's a great, time-saving feature and will be especially handy for those of us whose springboards are full.

If you watch the video through the end, you'll also get a sneak peek at the OS's cut/copy/paste feature, another of which has been desperately needed for some time.

It's been widely speculated that the new iPhone 3.0 OS will make its official debut next week at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. We're certainly hoping that rumor is true!