High Order Blog

We’re excited to announce the release of our latest product, Twitbit, a Twitter app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out on the App Store. We’ve worked hard to build a clean and elegant application that keeps the simple things simple while providing a rich and complete feature set.

We realize the Twitter iPhone application market is pretty crowded. The last few months alone have seen the release of several major new apps. With so much great work already being done, what do we have to contribute? And why would we want to?

Twitter’s genius is in its simplicity: people post short messages. Period. (Basically.)

The iPhone is the world’s first true handheld computer, and one of the most exciting developer playgrounds to come around in a long time.

In short, the possibilities are just too exciting to resist.

I can hear people saying, “this is all fine and dandy, but that doesn’t mean you just run out and build your own Twitter app.” It’s true that there’s already a lot of choice out there. We have several iPhone Twitter apps installed ourselves, and before we built Twitbit we used them regularly. They’re great pieces of software – we wouldn’t be using them if they weren’t – and we have a ton of respect for the work that’s gone into them.

Nevertheless, we feel that each one has its own set of shortcomings. We’d rather have a single Twitter app that fits with the way we think about and use Twitter.

Even more important, though, is that there are several significant features we want but that don’t exist in any Twitter iPhone app. The most significant is push notifications, which we’ve built into Twitbit (more on that in a minute), but it’s far from the last.

So we did what programmers do: we built our own.

We approached Twitbit the same way we’ve approached everything else we’ve built. We made something we love to use with the belief that others will love to use it, too.

Push Notifications for Twitter

Support for push notifications is one of the most significant features we wanted in a Twitter client. Still, supporting them gave us pause. While it has some advantages, push notifications are far from an ideal solution to the problem of “background tasks.” We’ve written before about both the technical and business challenges push notifications present in general, and for a small software company like ours in particular.

For all their problems, though, we felt like push notifications had huge potential for a Twitter app. For many users, they could completely transform their interaction with the service. The possibilities were just too exciting to pass up, so we took the plunge.

We’ve been using Twitbit amongst ourselves and our friends and family for a while now, and we can confirm that push notifications have changed the way we use Twitter. We think they will for other people, too.

Is My Entire Twitter Stream Pushed to Me?

No. Only mentions and direct messages are pushed. We are considering adding more fine-grained control over what gets pushed and what doesn’t, but for now you get all mentions and direct messages pushed to your phone. If you don’t want push notifications at all, simply turn them off in iPhone’s settings.

Are Push Notifications Sent in Real-Time?

No. Our service polls Twitter periodically. This is both the most robust and the easiest implementation Twitter provides at the moment. Twitter does have a real-time API, but it’s only alpha quality right now so we didn’t think it made sense to use it for the first version. We are very interested in experimenting with it in the not-too-distant future, however.

That said, one of our primary concerns is getting push notifications as close to real-time as possible. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on our servers and working hard to reduce the polling interval as much as we can.

What Are Twitbit’s Other Features?

Twtbit provides a ton of great features, including OAuth authentication, so you don’t have to give your Twitter username and password to yet another application; cached timelines; and overall speed and ease-of-use. You can find a full feature list on the Twitbit web page.

We’re Just Getting Started

Twitbit 1.0 is a complete and full-featured Twitter application, but it’s only the beginning. We have a lot of very exciting and ambitious features planned for the future.

If you have any questions about Twitbit, suggestions for features, or if you think you’ve encountered a bug, please send us an email. We’d love to hear from you.

Aside from watching this blog, you can keep tabs on what’s keeping us busy by following @twitbitapp or @highorderbit on Twitter.