The iPhone 3.0 update is almost here now. One of the features that we and many others have been looking forward to the most is the new push notification service from Apple. We are also curious about how reliable push notifications will be.

Why do we wonder about reliability? Because push notifications are sent from third-party servers to Apple’s servers, and then on to your iPhone.

In short: Apple becomes a single point of failure since it acts as a go-between for all push notifications.

Above: Just imagine the go-between Apple Push Notification Service failing…

Apple not only has to make sure that notifications are delivered, it has to make sure that your iPhone gets them in a timely manner. The real-time demands of the new feature may reveal weaknesses in Apple’s backend infrastructure.

A scalability challenge for Apple

Considering that the push feature is set to become highly popular and will be used by a lot of iPhone applications, this will result in an abundance of push notifications that have to pass through Apple’s servers. Apple will have to make sure its service can scale to handle this additional stress on its systems.

Remember that Apple had significant problems when it launched the MobileMe service (as Steve Jobs admitted). The push notification service is essentially a new web service, so hopefully Apple has learnt from past mistakes and has its backend infrastructure well prepared.

Developer trust

If Apple fails to provide reliable push notifications, even just intermittently, it will result in some serious trust issues from third-party iPhone developers.

While a few delayed (or even worse, undelivered) notifications may not be a big deal for many applications, it will be absolutely critical for some applications that notifications are delivered reliably and on time.

For example, we’ll be looking into using push notifications for our own Pingdom iPhone application down the line, so reliable notifications will be important to us. In our case it would be alerts that your website has gone down, information you would be pretty upset about missing or getting late. We’re sure there are plenty of other applications where the damage done by missed notifications would be significant as well.

In other words, it becomes a matter of credibility and trust, and Apple is going to have to earn it.

On the plus side, Apple is planning ahead

Let’s face it, the engineers at Apple must be well aware of the challenges they are facing. We just hope that they are able to deliver. We love the iPhone (most of us have one), and we want this to be a successful feature launch.

Thankfully it seems that Apple is not resting on its laurels. One good sign that Apple is taking some serious steps in bettering its infrastructure is the recently announced plan for a new billion-dollar data center the United States.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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