Google+ Push Notification via iOS

This week Google launched their new social product Google +, which is currently in a "Limited Field Testing" mode and the iPhone native app is currently "Under Review".  Although you can receive notifications via email and if your iPhone is setup to get push email you essentially get a push notification.  If you are like me you use GMail and don't like a clutter of notification messages in your inbox so you create a filter to remedy that. 

I used to use Boxcar on the iPhone when many of my native apps didn't have push support but now most of them have push notifications natively.

I re-downloaded Boxcar on my iPhone and setup a push alert on an Email account.  This will then send a verification email that contains a new Boxcar email address for this new push service.  Once this is complete I just did the following:

1. Setup a new GMail filter that contains "@plus.google.com" in the FROM address
2. Check "Skip Inbox" (this keeps your inbox clean!)
3. Check "Forward to" and setup a Forwarding address for the Boxcar address you received in your confirmation email.
4. Optional: Check "Apply Label "Google+" (a label I created for all Google+ content)

Once this is set, make sure your Google+ notifications are set to email on what you want to be notified and now these notifications will be pushed in the regular fashion to your iOS device without cluttering up GMail.

Obviously once the official Google+ app hits the Apple App Store it will probably have this feature.  Once Google gets out of this field testing phase and opens up an API we will have many other options but for now this seems to be the easiest way to get this working.  Funny how this makes me want to dump the iPhone and switch to Android right now! ~Lou