8% of Tweeters using Twitter iPhone app

Über-popular social networking and microblogging site Twitter (145 million registered users and counting) released an official free iPhone app onto Apple’s marketplace in May.

Power Twitter users can tweet, retweet, search, reply, Direct Message, and browse trending topics to their heart's content on their iDevice. New customers can even sign up to a Twitter account from within the client.

One piece of functionality missing from the Twitter iPhone app, however, is push notifications, a service which pings messages and alerts directly to your handset in the form of badges or sounds.

Twitter Inc. has confirmed via TechCrunch that this feature will be rolled out soon, though the exact nature of the notifications - you wouldn’t want status updates from your entire ‘following’ pushed across, for example! - are yet to be clarified.

In a Twitter blog post recently, the company pronounced the success of its iPhone client, declaring it the fourth most popular way in which account holders log into the service.

Here are the Top 10 Twitter apps by unique users in August:

1. twitter.com (78%)
2. m.twitter.com (14%)
3. SMS (8%)
4. Twitter for iPhone (8%)
5. Twitter for BlackBerry (7%)
6. TwitPic (4%)
7. TweetDeck (3%)
8. Echofon (3%)
9. Google Friend Connect (2%)
10. UberTwitter (2%)