Smart proposal from Marco Arment for a new multitasking type:
[A ‘periodic network request’] would allow Instapaper to download updates in the background, and would also greatly benefit RSS readers, Twitter clients, chat programs, weather and news widgets, and a huge number of other applications that currently can’t get much benefit from iOS’ multitasking.
I like this idea better than background notifications because it doesn’t require user interaction via a modal-type popup that interrupts everything.