Jasonified.

In a recent tweet I mentioned how I believed that location based services are going to be very “last year” and the new next big thing will be proxmity/vicinity services. In other words location puts you in a place and proximity puts you in a room, on a floor, outside a shop, next to a device etc.

(btw I’m not saying location itself is dead it’s just the first part of a process to enhance the offering - you need proximity for the detail)

Just now my Boxcar push notifications for twitter (which should work on my iPad and iPhone) were only coming through on the iPad and it got me wondering….

…wouldn’t it be neat to have a proxmity preference setting that said “I’d like to get push notifications but this is my preferred device (or my preferred device is the one I’m using/looking at) and if another device is nearby and has the same push settings, only display them here”

So, I can have my push notifications set on BOTH my iPad and iPhone but my (soon to be invented and make me millions of pennies) proximity system would ONLY notify me on my preferred device so I wouldn’t get multiple “pings”

One step further is to use my soon to be not invented or patented “proximity chip” (which would be fitted to a watch, ring, embedded under the skin etc) to detect *which* device I’m closest to and ONLY show the notification on that one!

Going further what if we ditch the ship and use a device with a camera that is kinect/3D/face aware which could throw it’s two pennies worth in, telling other devices that IT is the closest thing to me because I’m looking straight at it and so popup the message there.

Now that’s a future I can live in.

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?)