Twitter pushing notifications

The release of iPhone 3.0 at last brought support for push notifications, the technology Apple first announced back at WWDC 2008, only to quietly stop talking about it as it reached and passed its original due date. Fortunately, the feature re-surfaced at WWDC 2009 as part of the new iPhone OS. But with push notifications now in the wild, it’s up to developers to take advantage of them.
So far a few uses have seen the light of day, such as instant-messaging clients and even an iPhone app for Growl notifications, but what of that most hot, hip, and with-it of social networks, Twitter? Twitter’s direct message functionality, which lets you send a private message (as long as the recipient follows you), particularly benefits from the addition of notifications, since it’s become a popular way for people to communicate, just like Facebook messages. In some cases, it’s an excellent substitute for sending text messages, and push notifications helps bring it up to snuff with the iPhone’s SMS support. For the most part, though, it does seem that push notifications are a feature that Twitter users are demanding, and it's likely that almost every popular client will have integrated the technology in some form or another before long. Then comes the real question: how will we handle the endless influx of notifications that is sure to await us? One can only hope there will be an app for that.