Pay Per Services
I just picked up my bill from iTunes, payment of $0 for a free iPhone app. I glanced down to the “Those who bought your selections also bought…” box and noticed boxcar.
In brief, it delivers notifications of various social updates directly to your iPhone — “Ding.” It supports Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. For Twitter, it will notify you of tweets that mention you, and also hash tags, which might be really useful during certain hyper-tweeted events, such as Educon, in Philadelphia, the end of the month. So I downloaded it.
What’s interesting is the way the money part works. You get the app for free. However, as you add notification services (first one is free), they charge a small one-time fee. It’s a small charge, and I’m not complaining. But it’s an interesting way to generate income from a phone app. In a way, it’s a lot like buying ringtones, but your are buying a process — a piece of code that makes your phone behave in a certain way. Actually, it’s not at all unlike how our phone companies work, the more I think about it.
| Fees are: | Twitter Account — | $0.99 |
| Twitter Search — | $1.99 | |
| Twitter Trends — | $0.99 | |
| Email Account — | $0.99 | |
| Facebook Account — | $0.99 | |
| Growl — | $0.99 | |
| RSS or Atom Feed — | $0.99 |
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The Pay Per Services by 2¢ Worth, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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I actually paid $2.99 for Boxcar back in the day, which isn’t really irritating because it’s only $3, but it’s a little irritating.
I use it for Twitter, Facebook messages, and Gmail. Gmail is great since the iPhone’s Mail.app’s notifications are completely worthless. Getting the notifications from Boxcar also frees me to use Gmail Mobile instead of Mail.app.
The only problem (and it’s not Boxcar’s fault) is that the iPod Touch doesn’t hold its wifi while it’s sleeping. So you only get notifications on your Touch when it’s “live.” The app doesn’t have to be running, but your screen has to be lit up for wifi to kick in and get you notifications. On the iPhone, the data connection is persistent.
Reply to Russ Goerend