Surely it has happened to you on more than one occasion to check your smartphone notifications, see some of Twitter, other social networks and some other apps and, at the moment, after closing them, realizing that you don’t remember what they were. Don’t worry, you don’t have a memory problem (at least in principle, go). The main reason for this is that we have reached a point where there are so many notifications that we receive throughout the day, that we have already developed a kind of filter that makes us only give importance to those that are important, and that the The rest go almost unnoticed.
To this, we must also add how terribly awkward they can be. Sometimes, because they arrive just when they are the most annoying, and on other occasions, because they arrive at the right time so that you do not know that you have received them and, later, they appear buried among another sea of more notifications. And the fact is that, of course, this goes against the interests of the companies that, as is the case with Twitter, would like you to see each one of them, and that would translate into you opening the app and accessing the service.
And this is something common in online services, from Twitter to Netflix (as we told you yesterday), whether they are free or paid, one of their main objectives is to get you to spend as much time as possible in them. For these purposes, Facebook and Amazon are as much rivals as Villa Arriba and Villa Abajo. And this is where notifications become important. Or, to be more exact, the intelligence behind them, and that determines their operation.
1/ Today, I’m excited to share that Twitter has acquired @OpenBackHQa mobile platform that helps make apps more engaging through device-side control of push notifications.
— Jay Sullivan (@jaysullivan) April 12, 2022
Thus, it is easily understandable that, as we can read in the social network itself, Twitter has acquired OpenBack, a platform that has specialized in precisely that, in optimizing the flow of notifications in smartphones in order to ensure that they have the greatest possible impact on the user. That is, to improve the relationship between the volume of notifications received and the number of them that are opened. The announcement has been published by Jay Sullivan, head of consumer product at Twitter.
OpenBack technology, now owned by Twitter, is integrated into the apps responsible for notifications, and locally processes the repercussion of the same, in order to detect which ones are more effective and which ones go unnoticed by that specific user. And based on this observation, which according to the company never leaves the device to go to the cloud or anything like that, the app, in this case the Twitter app, tries to fine-tune the presentation of notifications to maximize their effect.
