Twitter, why did you bother with push?

So Twitter finally rolled our push notifications for their iOS clients yesterday.

After waiting for “digital decades” (real world months) for Twitter/Tweetie to embrace push we have the finally ability to be notified via a pop-up message whenever anyone mentions us or sends us a message.

But wait, what about re-tweets? More importantly what about actually getting push notifications?

Up to now I’ve been using Boxcar to make up for the lack of push notifications on Twitter for iOS and it works perfectly. It’s almost instantaneous and not only covers entry level notifications like mentions and messages but also Re-tweets, new follows AND lets you know when you’re added to a list.

Since last night I’ve been running Boxcar on the iPad and Twitter with Push on the iPhone and the fact is Boxcar wins hands down.

In most cases Twitter either lags behind Boxcar or notifications simply don’t arrive and whilst Boxcar continues to light up with Re-tweets Twitter remains in its dozy slumber.

Add to this the fact that Boxcar can be fully configured with “Quiet times”, sounds and customisable notifications and the obvious question is why did Twitter bother?

(Oh and where’s the delete option in Twitter for iPad?)