We all need ‘a place of our own’ in ‘the Cloud’, to replace ‘the desktop’ as the place notifications are sent to and distributed from. To be successful, it would need to be based on open protocols, so that any service provider can host the service, and must include at least one good FOSS implementation so we can DIY it. Is there a W3C committee working on this, that I haven’t heard about?
I frequently move between Android phone & tablet and Ubuntu desktop. I am sick of being repeatedly notified of something I read 2 hours ago. My devices don’t read my notifications, I do and I don’t want to have to go to a web wite to fetch them. I want them to find me, be read, then be cleared unless I say not to and for that to be propagated. Most of the OSs seem to have finally got a working notification system, about 3 years after it might have been useful without such a service.
Ubuntu or Mozilla would have been obvious places to launch an anti-competition service back then, for the good of the users. Now, I guess we’ll have to depend on Mozilla and even then they’d try to market it to sound like it depends on sign-up to Firefox Sync.
Overlapping-tribes notification would be an obvious expansion. Google Circles would have been a good place to start, if we could trust them. A WebRTC Googlist told me that the people who took the XMPP out of Googe Talk are ‘no longer with them’. The trouble is: I’m not sure if that was for being Evil or for getting caught.
On The Outside 