Designing online communities can be tricky. One thing most developers want to do is develop some sense of belonging. This could perhaps be done using notifications that let you know what's going on (or what you're missing) but this leads to information overload (or what Belshaw calls notification literacy). The main problem (it appears from this discussion) is that the notifications pull us from whatever context we were in (Chris Aldrich says says "people may frequently ask themselves 'where was I?'") so perhaps, says Belshaw, some sort of visual metaphor social media home page might be better than a notifications feed. Me, I don't want a social media home page (let alone a firehose of notifications) at all. I'd rather have my own personal home page, using my own social media filters and algorithms and filters. (p.s. this article wins the prize for most boring article illustration).
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