One of my favorite apps is Night Stand [iTunes Link]. This app contains a variety of different themes (clock displays) and has an alarm, pretty basic but I use it every day. Last night when I ran it, I found that there was a new clock theme named Glow for in-app purchase. It looked interesting but there was no way to find out the cost without hitting the 'buy' button which I did. Luckily, before it was purchased, a confirmation screen came up with the price of US0.99. This was a bit surprising since US0.99 was the full price of the app which already came with six themes.

This got me thinking about whether in-app purchasing will work or not, or if there is any rhyme or reason to pricing? I wouldn't buy one-sixth of the value of an app for full price and I wonder who would? Last week we ran a story on how in-app buying is not working out so well for Pangea. I wonder if it's working out for anyone?

My feeling is that iPhone apps are looked upon differently than full Macintosh applications. They are cheaper and tend to do one thing only. Night Stand is a clock, it doesn't purport to be more than be a clock. So what should a new clock theme be worth?

I've started viewing apps as casual purchases and at the price I don't expect more than one thing, which if done well, is worth the buck. So I'm not seeing the value of highly priced in-app sales. I can see the reason for some expensive apps charging for major functionality increases, such as Navigon when they added a $US20 live traffic option to their $US90 Mobile Navigation app, but that seems to be the exception and not the rule.

I would guess that extra gaming levels would be an expected revenue source, but I just don't see the majority of people spending enough time with a game app to run out of levels and buy more.

Take the poll below and then comment on your feelings on in-app purchasing. Will this turn out to be something big, or is it just another solution looking for a problem?

Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron are the folks with their names on Aurora Feint, but as Danielle told us in an interview a while ago, Peter Relan is the real mastermind behind the growing Feint empire. Not only did he put the two together in an idea lab, but he's one of the driving forces behind the OpenFeint enterprise. Under his oversight, the Feint folks have swelled to become one of the major forces behind iPhone gaming (and thus, behind the iPhone's app ecosystem itself).

Netanel "Net" Jacobsson is a newer addition -- he's previously worked with Sony Ericsson on their mobile devices and Facebook on their own growing app empire, and now he's arrived at OpenFeint to help them use the lessons he's learned at the biggest online social networks around on their social software. Get the sense of how big this is yet? Relan, Jacobsen, and Citron all have pretty big ideas about where iPhone gaming is going, and as 3.0 comes down the pike and introduces a whole set of new features from Apple, they're in the best seat they can be in to do exactly what they want to do.

TUAW sat down with the three last week, and chatted about iPhone 3.0 and why it's such a big deal for developers, how they're going to approach microtransactions (carefully), and what's coming next for OpenFeint now that they've rounded up a whole stable full of developers implementing their backbone. Click "read more" to continue.

With iPhone OS 3.0 only having been released yesterday, two big companies are already angling to be developers' go-to for setting up push notifications and other online services for the new apps. OpenFeint was the first service we've heard about -- they have been offering social networking connections to developers for a while, but with the new firmware release, they tell us that they're also hosting options for both push notifications and microtransactions to their stable of app developers.

That stable includes apps like Pocket God and Aurora Feint (Danielle Cassley of both Aurora Feint and OpenFeint told us a while back that she was very excited at the prospect of microtransactions with 3.0), and both of those games, as well as others on the service, are planning to include push notifications with "social challenges" -- you'll challenge a friend to complete a certain goal in game, and then get notified when they meet that goal. Look for those new features in an OpenFeint app near you.

And OpenFeint isn't the only service jockeying for developers' attention -- Urban Airship is also making a bid to host push notifications for iPhone game developers. They've landed one of the first push-enabled games, Tap Tap Revenge, and are looking to offer push to more devs, along with in-app purchase support as well. They don't quite have the library together that OpenFeint already does, but their service integrates, they say, in just a matter of hours, and their aim is to make it "brain dead easy" for developers.

The floodgates are open, and we're sure to see more and more companies jump in on hosting plans like this in the future. Prepare to be pushed.