The next iPhone remains a single tasking beast, seductive as hell. But the iPhone lacks the background processing Skype uses to keep you connected.

Skype does wonderful things in the background.

• Sharing your availability and mood message.

• Queuing inbound friend-requests and retrying outbound requests.

• Persistent chat room messaging.

• P2P supernoding that keeps the Skype network connected.

• File transfers that continue after you start something else.

• Updating the presence, profile, and mood of each of your contacts.

• And answering Skype calls, when you are using your device for something else.

Rob Hof of BusinessWeek live blogged Monday's Apple WWDC keynote:

[Scott] Forstall [SVP iPhone software], however, has more to talk about. He sets this up by trashing companies — he shows Samsung [Instinct] — that allow apps that run background applications after you think you've stopped an app. Forstall says this eats up battery life and slows performance.

So Apple instead is providing a push notification service for developers, which allows them to send various types of alerts after the application is no longer hooked up to the network. He says this scales better because there's only one persistent connection needed. This works over WiFi and cellular. It will be available in September.

Engadget quotes Forstall in more detail:

"There has been one feature request that doesn't currently exist... it's mainly come from clients like IM, where by their very nature they want to get a notification even if the user isn't running the app. We absolutely want to solve this problem, the question is how?"

"The wrong solution is to enable background processes... to allow an app to continue to run even after their user thinks they quit it." Windows Mobile, we're looking at you. Why's it bad? "First, battery life, it drains power. Second, performance, it sucks up cycles and makes other things feel sluggish." Uh oh, he's showing the WinMo task manager.

"We've come up with a far better solution -- a push notification service Apple will provide to all developers.

Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone, where a 3rd party server can ping Apple's notification service to your device. It can push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts (like how SMS overlays look).

"The great thing about this: it scales... it's a unified push notification service for all devs. It preserves battery life and maintains performance. And it all works over the air -- WiFi and cellular. Available in September, but next month we'll be seeding to devs. This has been an update of the SDK, thank you!"

But this push service sucks.

1. It intermediates Apple. You want to talk to your customers? You have to go through Apple. It's a bottleneck, single point of failure, and a (gag!) walled garden.

2. It is hostile to P2P. Customers cannot talk to each other. One way notification goes from servers to phones. Phones can't send notifications back to servers or to other phones.

3. Notifications kill foreground sessions. For Apple's push service to do anything useful, they need to invoke an application on the phone. And since apps only run in the foreground, they will close your current foreground app to launch themselves. Is this consistent with good UX design? 

Finally, Apple's Push abandons Cluetrain values. Where the Cluetrain Manifesto empowers people, their tools and the edge of networks, Apple's Push Notification Service concentrates power in Apple's hands while tying user hands.