The need for notifications is just a symptom of an idiotic system overall.
When was the last time that a company offered you to notify you by (snail) mail when there was a letter available for you to pick up at their headquarters?
It's a workaround for having to poll multiple event (posting) sources. Which only arises because we have multiple event sources. Which is completely unnecessary, technically. (I am talking about the user interface here, of course - it's perfectly fine to have the software poll multiple sources, or, even better, to have some protocol-level notification/push mechanism, of course, but the user should not ever have to deal with it.)
That also does not mean that integrating with email, say, is necessarily a bad idea - but not in order to tell a human that they should poll some event source, but as an interface medium for the actual discussion (that is, essentially as a mailing list). e-mail supports much of the necessary basic functionality, and it's also an existing infrastructure that give the user one UI of their choice for all communication partners.
Comments
The need for notifications is just a symptom of an idiotic system overall.
When was the last time that a company offered you to notify you by (snail) mail when there was a letter available for you to pick up at their headquarters?
It's a workaround for having to poll multiple event (posting) sources. Which only arises because we have multiple event sources. Which is completely unnecessary, technically. (I am talking about the user interface here, of course - it's perfectly fine to have the software poll multiple sources, or, even better, to have some protocol-level notification/push mechanism, of course, but the user should not ever have to deal with it.)
That also does not mean that integrating with email, say, is necessarily a bad idea - but not in order to tell a human that they should poll some event source, but as an interface medium for the actual discussion (that is, essentially as a mailing list). e-mail supports much of the necessary basic functionality, and it's also an existing infrastructure that give the user one UI of their choice for all communication partners.