I was reading a bunch of posts today that seem to have been sparked by Alex Iskold post over at ReadWriteWeb where he was asking Is Email In Danger [nw], which I’ll be adding my 2cents to later. While I was reading my email notification was going off letting me know I was getting notifications of new post comments as well as Twitter and FriendFeed  new follower notifications. As well I got a could of Last.fm notifications to through in with the mix.

In other words I was being notified to death via my email inbox and they wonder why people are asking if they drowning under a daily pile of next to useless emails.

With the rapid increase of social media type services we are seeing an exponential flood of these notification emails hitting us on a daily basis. Sure you can turn them off which I am sure a great number of people do but there are those of us who don’t because we do really want to be notified of new items. It is just that it almost feels like you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

As I thought about this mess we have created for ourselves my mind wandered over the stuff I had read yesterday about Gnip and I had sort of an aha type moment – what if some smart person out there took the idea of Gnip but applied it to this notification hell we have found ourselves in. It could even be much like how FriendFeed lets us import our services this service could let us somehow import our various services we are subscribed to and then our notifications could be routed to them. Then at our leisure we could load up that service and see what new notifications were waiting for us. Even better would be if they had an API that developers could create desktop widgets against that could just sit there looking pretty but we would be able just look over to see if anything new had arrived – at our leisure.

I realize that something like this will never happen but it sure is nice to dream about but right now if you’ll excuse me I have a couple more notifications that just arrived that I have to check out.