Twitter gets push notifications. Mentions and DM’s covered, iPhone is first.

In case you’ve forgotten, Twitter was initially designed to be used on your mobile phone. In view of that, the applications for iPhone and Android have been great, but there are still some things missing. Applications like Boxcar enable push notifications for your mentions, but now those notifications are native to the Twitter app for iPhone.

According to the Twitter blog, you’ll now be able to get push notifications on your iPhone via the Twitter for iPhone client when someone sends you an @mention or direct message. There’s no Android love, just yet, but both the Android and the Windows Phone 7 versions should be coming soon.

If you want to activate the service, you’ll need to head to twitter.com/devices and do so manually by checking the “text message notifications” box. Of course, you can get SMS notifications no matter what device you’re on, so that’s a great option for those of us who aren’t carrying an Apple device.

Twitter also is reminding us that you can change your settings at any time, even via mobile:

For example, text “set mentions all’ to turn on notifications for @mentions from everyone, rather than just those whom you follow, and ‘set mentions off’ to turn off @mentions notifications.