Roman points us to the interesting news that the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority has been sued for patent infringement for this daring and shocking bit of piracy: notifying riders that a bus may be late and when it's likely to arrive. You see most normal people would think that this is an obvious idea to those skilled in the art. The reason it wasn't done in the past wasn't because the idea was so difficult to contemplate, or that it was a huge technological challenge, it was merely a limitation of the other technology that makes this possible. Once GPS technology got cheaper, wireless data transmission became more widespread and cheaper and (finally) more people started carrying smartphones (or even SMS-capable phones) this kind of feature sprung up all over the place. It wasn't because some random dude patented the idea, but because it's obvious once all the other key pieces are in place, and it's relatively easy to implement.

But don't tell that to Martin Jones, who holds a bunch of these patents. The "Clevescene" story above does not identify the patents or link to the actual legal filing (why don't news sites do that?!?), but after looking around, it's easy to find that Jones and the company he represents have filed over a hundred lawsuits like this recently over a variety of patents. I'm not sure exactly which patents he's claiming in this particular case, but here's Patent # 5,400,020 for a school bus notification system and Patent # 5,623,260 for a notification system for "impending arrival of a transportation vehicle." There are a lot more similar patents that all seem to be slight variations on the same thing. It seems he had this idea and has tried to lock it up and demand payment from tons and tons of companies -- with many agreeing to pay up.

While a lot of the attention on today's Apple announcements were around the cloud stuff, there were a bunch of changes to iOS announced, too, and what was striking was how many of them really looked like Apple scrambling to play catchup to Android on certain features -- with the pull down notifications being a key such feature. That feature is standard on my Android phone and has been for some time, and it looks almost identical to the Apple iOS implementation.

Of course, this is only fair. Google has clearly copied many of the features of iOS, in building up Android. In fact, I think most people would reasonably agree that Android owes a far greater debt to Apple than Apple owes to Google for features. But the point is that this sort of innovation goes both ways. Whenever we hear about complaints about "copying" or "ripping off" features, people seem to ignore the fact that everyone does this, and it pushes everyone to do more in the future. It increases the pace of innovation. If Android didn't have such a notification bar (which is quite effective), Apple might not have realized what a disjointed mess its old notifications were. Thus, this ends up improving Apple. Not only that, but it gives both parties reasons to think about making the notification effort even better, going forward, to continue to differentiate.

Now, some might claim that if Google had been able to block such copies via patents, Apple would have had to "invent around" this and create something different. But would that really have been useful or efficient? Doesn't seem like it. Under that scenario, one party is inventing something new for the sake of inventing something new. Under the way it is here, everyone has incentive to create something new, only if it really improves the offering. That seems like a much better path to innovation.

Slashdot points us to the news that a lawsuit against Netflix and Blockbuster for patent infringement has been dismissed by a California court. At issue was a patent, 7,389,243, that is for a method for alerting users to the status of their rental queue. Read through the claims and look at the drawings and try to figure out how such a patent was possibly approved. It's patents like this one that make people question what patent examiners actually do. So it's nice to see the patent holder sent packing, though you have to wonder if GameFly, who had previously settled a lawsuit over the same patent is now regretting that decision.

If you're not an OS X application developer, you can be forgiven for missing last week's debut of MGTwitterEngine. It is, admittedly, a bit arcane: a software component designed for use by developers that allows them to more easily interface with a proprietary messaging network. I wouldn't hold my breath for an Xbox version if I were you. But the software -- and the enthusiastic response it received -- are still worth noting as evidence of notification frameworks' potential for growth.

Many Mac users are familiar with Growl, the ambient notification system that tastefully alerts them of new emails, appointments, completed downloads or any of a huge variety of other system events. There are libraries that make it easy for developers to make their applications display messages through Growl, and many have. But while an ambient notification on your screen is great, an ambient notification that gets routed to whatever display you find most useful is better. So MGTwitterEngine makes it easy for developers to get their apps talking to Twitter (not that it was very hard to begin with -- Twitter's API is quite easy to use). If the idea catches on, soon you'll be able to get a Tweet when your DVD rip completes or as confirmation when your nightly backup succeeds. I wrote about "push" notification technology's resurgence a little while ago; when I did, these were some of the kinds of applications that I had in mind.

Of course, I don't mean to simply boost Twitter. As others have pointed out in comments to previous posts, the service can be spotty, and these days it's far from unique. Twitter owes its current success to its pedigree, its developer-friendly API and its SMS capabilities; for those reasons it seems likely to be the first to gain significant traction in the application notification space. But it would be a shame if a proprietary solution wins the day. For that reason it's worth keeping an eye on the occasional discussions hosted by Dave Winer about building a noncommercial, federated Twitter alternative (likely on top of XMPP).

Will those musings go anywhere? I have to admit that I have no idea — I'm skeptical, but wary of betting against such an endeavor after witnessing OpenID's come-from-behind success. Either way, it seems certain that soon more websites, applications and services are going to be sending me notifications through Twitter or something like it -- perhaps even allowing some of the musings of my colleagues in the Techdirt Insight Community, on how Twitter can be useful for companies to start to come true.