You know there are particular links that are cluttered with pseudo-pop-ups. ESPN has then. What if notifications becomes biased to divert people towards these particular links? That would be a more subtle, but very effective, way of generating advertisement revenue.
Not going to happen. Will they allow partners to advertise on their "feed"? That remains to be seen. But it's just as easy to turn off the feed as it is to turn it on. I would imagine sites don't want to intentionally piss off their users. Apple has the power to shut down any site's push notifications as well.
ARN
Apple never explained this much... Is this like tracking cookies for the OS X? Could you write an article explaining more details and with privacy issues as a consideration?
Thanks for the great forum.
I'm not privy to the way Mavericks does the implementation but I have setup push notifications for iOS and I would imagine they work the same way. There's no way a spammer is going to be able to use this effectively.
For one you need to a registered Apple developer. To send push notifications you also need a certificate that talks directly to Apple's server. Your server sends the message to Apple's server and Apple sends it on—it's not like spam where anyone can setup a rogue server and send anyone on the planet an e-mail. The setup is actually a pain because you need to register each app. Last I looked, each website domain will need to register to be able to send.
Two, this is limited to Mac OS X users. That shrinks the market down to <10%. Spammers want volume. I can see iOS developers who already have apps in the app store or big sites using this but it's too finicky to setup properly for the average website. For one typical shared (crappy) hosting blocks the ports necessary to communicate with Apple's server to begin with so your favorite blog probably won't be able to give you ability.
Push notifications basically send your device a message and in this case a web link. Theoretically you could track who's clicking the message but you would need to gain details about that person first. If it's anything like iOS you can't get personal details from a person opting in, they're anonymous but since a notification is pretty much just sending you a link, the link could be any url so if you associate that link with an account, you could be tracked.
I can see this being used for things where e-mail notifications were previously used—think FedEx delivery notifications—or someone beat me to it above—forum replies would be useful. Your bank could theoretically use this to tell you when a big deposit hit your account or when you bill is due (like the Chase app on iOS does now) etc.