Over the past few hours, you may have noticed a dramatic increase in the speed of pushed replies from iTweetReply – This is because we have recently enabled a new feature on the Syncode cloud, utilising the new Streaming API provided by Twitter.

Syncode has enabled the Streaming API for all users – this means that instead of the Syncode cloud having to go to Twitter every X minutes (set in options), Twitter tells the server whenever there is a new reply over a continuous connection, rather like push email from Google Sync and MobileMe. This means that replies take but a few seconds to arrive at your device.

The system is not perfect – the Streaming API only provides access to public data, so replies won’t stream from people with protected profiles, and Direct Messages cannot be streamed – so the server will continue to poll Twitter every 2 minutes for the data that can’t be accessed via Streaming. The streaming API itself is still in the Alpha stage (as it is still very much a new feature) so this secondary checking facility helps to correct any unforeseeable issues – should a reply not stream, it will be picked up at the next polling interval as before.

Syncode hopes to continue to innovate and that all iTweetReply users enjoy these new almost instant notifications.