The latest version of Boxcar, the push notification organizing app extraordinaire for the iPhone, has just hit the app store and with it came a couple new services that we think you (and many of your bacon-eating, narwhal-loving friends) are going to really enjoy.
Version 4.1 comes with expanded Twitter support, a handful of usability updates, and support for Foursquare, Gowalla and, you guessed it, Reddit.
The Latest, Greatest of the Late
Boxcar 4.0 actually hit the App Store last week with a brand new design and a bunch of new services. Google Buzz, Google Voice, Github and a couple others were all added, as was the ability to reply to Tweets directly from within the app.
We spoke with Boxcar CEO Jonathon George and asked him a little bit about the new services. He told us that Boxcar would begin offering alerts for friends’ check-ins on Gowalla and Foursquare, with additional functionality coming in the future.
“The long term plan here,” said George, “is to deliver notifications for anything and everything on the web, anywhere you would like.”
Nevermind That Jazz, Boxcar Has Reddit!
As for Reddit (our personal favorite addition in this update, if you couldn’t tell), Boxcar goes a little bit further.
“For smaller subreddits that don’t get much traffic, you can put in the name of the subreddit and a ‘threshold’,” he explained. “We’ll send you a notification anytime a post crosses that scoring threshold.”
For the uninitiated, that means that whenever a submission to the social bookmarking site is voted favorably upon by enough people, you’ll get notified.
Additionally, Boxcar has notifications for Reddit accounts, meaning you can get push notifications for Reddit messages (or “orangered!”, as he put it), comment replies and self-post replies.
The final addition deals with Twitter. Boxcar now lets users get notifications for whenever a user of their choosing tweets. They say something and you know – that simple.
Et Tu, Brute? (What About Twitter Push Notifications?)
Of course, with today’s announcement that Twitter would be adding push notifications to its iPhone app, we had to ask George how Boxcar would continue to hold its ground in that realm. The simple answer is that it’s a more full-featured, customizable solution, but let’s let George speak for himself. He offered five points:
- Find out when people favorite your tweets, retweet you, add you to a list or begin following you.
- Choose from any of our 20 sounds rather than using the default SMS tri-tone sound.
- Use Boxcar with any Twitter client.
- Quiet time for all of your notifications.
- Unified inbox for all of your push notifications.
For the power Twitter user, that certainly beats getting pinged only for @mentions and replies. We’re sold.
And if you’re on Reddit, well, I’m honestly not even sure what you’re doing still reading this. Go get the latest version of Boxcar in the App Store and give Boxcar an upvote, already!
