Real-time web notifications go live on Twitter.com

Twitter (web notifications 001)

Twitter is on a roll lately. After enabling photo tagging in mobile apps recently and introducing prettier user profile pages on the web yesterday (the design is reminiscent of Facebook profiles), the company Thursday started rolling out another new feature: real-time web notifications on Twitter.com.

That’s right, those notifications you get from Twitter on your phone are now popping up in the web interface as well.

These in-browser alerts are optional and can be disabled for retweets, favorites, follows, replies, mentions and more. The notifications are actionable so you’re able to reply, favorite, retweet and follow right from the alert. It’s a staggered roll-out over the coming weeks so be patient if you don’t yet see web notifications on Twitter.com…

Twitter says in-browser notifications pop up only when you’re logged in on twitter.com.

When it comes to your interactions on Twitter, it should be easy for you to stay connected to what’s relevant. With this in mind, we’re bringing you real-time notifications on twitter.com when someone is engaging with your Tweets.

Luckily, if you don’t want to be disturbed when skimming through news articles, a new Web Notifications settings in Twitter’s web interface provides for some flexibility in terms which web notifications get shown.

As illustrated below, you can optionally enable or disable alerts when one of your tweets gets retweeted, when someone favorites your tweet, when you’re followed by a person, when you receive a reply/mention and upon receiving a direct message.

Twitter (web notifications, settings)

Note that changing notifications settings here defines what types of alerts you want to get via email and mobile, not just on twitter.com. “If you use a Twitter app, check out your settings there too, so you can refine the types of push notifications you receive,” cautions the micro-blogging startup.

In-browser web notifications on Twitter.com work in Apple’s Safari for Mac, Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox and other standards compliant web browsers out there.

This is admittedly a nice and, for the most part, useful addition to Twitter’s features. That’s especially true for folks who don’t use desktop Twitter apps and are accustomed to interacting with their followers directly in the browser.

The startup is obviously betting on web notifications increasing engagement, which is crucial to keep those eyeballs glued to the screen, especially now that Twitter is a public company.

In last quarter, Twitter reported 241 million users in total, with 184 million mobile monthly users.

Do you like Twitter’s web notifications so far?