Max Beatty

Social net­works are great except you can’t always be there to see every­thing that’s going on. Peo­ple are always friend­ing, fol­low­ing, com­ment­ing, and direct mes­sag­ing. The default from the begin­ning has been to email you about this. Then came the SMS updates from AIM, Twit­ter, Face­book, and Brightkite even MySpace ::cringe::. Finally, push noti­fi­ca­tions came to the iPhone and I’m con­vinced I don’t need any­thing else.

For me, AOL Instant Mes­sen­ger was the first ser­vice I got SMS updates from. It didn’t mat­ter what num­ber the updates came from before I had an iPhone. When my texts became threaded, I came across a way to keep all my AIM texts in one stream using a vCard with all of their SMS num­bers. When Twit­ter came along, they just had one SMS num­ber which was fine, but then Face­book started offer­ing SMS noti­fi­ca­tions and they have close to 100 dif­fer­ent num­bers! I tried to cre­ate a proper vCard to dupli­cate my suc­cess with man­ag­ing AIM, but I could never get it to work prop­erly with Google Apps contacts.

(I have them pushed to my phone and they seem to only allow for one “mobile” num­ber per con­tact. If you can fig­ure this out, please let me know)

Face­book SMS Updates

Makes for a mess man­ag­ing text mes­sages, doesn’t it? Email is no bet­ter. I’ve setup a Gmail fil­ter for all of my social net­work accounts just so they don’t clut­ter my inbox and I’m not even one of those peo­ple who gets hun­dreds or thou­sands of emails a day. The email noti­fi­ca­tions, for the most part, don’t really tell me any­thing and just want me to come back to the site. I don’t gain any­thing from the noti­fi­ca­tion since I’m going to return to the site any­ways and it will tell me all the things that have hap­pened (good sites at least).

Social Emails

Solu­tion: Push Notifications

Instead of get­ting SMS or email noti­fi­ca­tions (and some­things both), I would rather get push noti­fi­ca­tions from my iPhone apps. I have apps for just about every net­work that sends me any sort of noti­fi­ca­tion (Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn, AIM, Brightkite, Foursquare). I’ve even con­sid­ered switch­ing to (or adding) Echo­fon because it offers push noti­fi­ca­tions for men­tions and DMs.

AIM is my favorite app with push noti­fi­ca­tions because when I installed their new app it new I had SMS noti­fi­ca­tions on and switched them to be “pushes” instead for me! It also allows me to keep signed in after I’ve closed the app for up to 24hrs so I can keep receiv­ing IMs if I’m away from my lap­top for an extended period of time.

To me, it would make sense for any web­site that offers SMS or email noti­fi­ca­tions to develop and deploy push noti­fi­ca­tions for their iPhone app. When I get push noti­fi­ca­tions, I don’t need any­thing else which saves them money in the long run (SMS is expen­sive). This would also save me money because I may be able to go to the next low­est tier of text mes­sages for my cell plan if I know I can elim­i­nate a cou­ple hun­dred incom­ing texts per month.

I know Face­book said they would be adding push noti­fi­ca­tions to their app later last sum­mer, but their lead devel­oper just quit yes­ter­day so who knows when they’ll add that. Twit­ter is in the busi­ness of let­ting every­one else build apps around their ser­vice so you can’t blame them. I can request Tweetie add push noti­fi­ca­tions so I’m not tempted to add another app just for that. I’m sur­prised (and dis­ap­pointed) Brightkite didn’t add push noti­fi­ca­tions after their big 2.0 roll­out. As a smaller startup who spends a lot of time on their mobile apps, you’d think that it would be higher on their pri­or­ity list.

Two apps that do it right are Foursquare and ESPN Fan­tasy Foot­ball. I just joined Foursquare and I’m not crazy about it since I haven’t been going out as much lately, but when some­one checks in near me I get an inno­cent push noti­fi­ca­tion instead of a text that costs me money. When I’m sit­ting on the couch all Sun­day (and now Thurs­day night), I get updates from ESPN about how I’m doing in both of my fan­tasy leagues. It’ll even notify me if one of my bench play­ers is pro­jected to outscore a starter!

Don’t worry I’m winning

These are all my per­sonal pref­er­ences and opin­ions. I know some peo­ple would pre­fer only get­ting email noti­fi­ca­tions and oth­ers have never turned on SMS noti­fi­ca­tions. Most peo­ple don’t have an iPhone so push noti­fi­ca­tions are out for them. Mobile noti­fi­ca­tions are becom­ing more preva­lent and SMS costs aren’t going down. Both social net­works and users alike are look­ing to save a buck and venders are lis­ten­ing. Just because the phrase “push noti­fi­ca­tions” is pretty much owned by the iPhone don’t think Android with the Motorola Blur and the Palm Pre aren’t try­ing to tap into that mar­ket with their own social play.

(One step fur­ther: why aren’t Pay­Pal, eBay, Chase, Bank of Amer­ica, and other finan­cial focused apps using push noti­fi­ca­tions? eBay wants to charge you for SMS updates on auc­tions, but wouldn’t push noti­fi­ca­tions be cheaper and drive more peo­ple to bid rais­ing their earn­ings? For the finan­cial insti­tutes who think it might be inse­cure, I already use Mint because they’ll alert me with push noti­fi­ca­tions about my accounts with you so what’s hold­ing you back?)