The wheels are already turning. -John Kalucki http://twitter.com/jkalucki Services, Twitter Inc.
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 7:12 PM, John A. Debay <j...@highorderbit.com> wrote: > I'm one of the software developers behind Twitbit, an iPhone Twitter > application (http://twitbitapp.com). We were the first full-featured > iPhone Twitter client to support push notifications because we've felt > from the beginning that being notified of relevant tweets and DMs "in > the background" was an important part of the Twitter experience, > especially on a mobile device. > > Our current server implementation polls Twitter periodically on the > user's behalf for mentions and direct messages. If a new one is found, > a notification is sent to the user's phone. > > While this solution works reasonably well, we'd like to be able to > push messages to our users in real-time. We've been interested in the > streaming API, but it appears it could only solve part of our problem, > namely notifying users when they've been mentioned publicly. In order > to keep all of our current functionality, we'd need to maintain the > current polling solution to send notifications for users who protect > their tweets and for direct messages. > > I'd like to know if there are any plans to either: > > - Provide some facility for accessing private data through the > streaming API, or > - Provide some other mechanism for applications like ours to gain real- > time access to this private data. > > Of course, all of this would be moot if Apple would provide a > mechanism for running background processes, but they don't so here we > are. > > Thanks in advance. > > John >
