Notifications Are Killing Email

Lack of understanding of email filtering rules is a large part of this. Email, with filtering rules, means that important messages from people who matter, get seen.

And important notifications.

Abuse of motifs such as messaging and notifications (hello, LinkedIn, I'm talking to you) leads to deprecation of just those messages. Though there are times and places when notifications are just what you need (site status messages for techies, financial accounts information for many others).

Incidentally, speaking of overused motifs, "fixed" website elements are increasingly triggering precisely the same response from me that spam emails are: pop open Stylebot, highlight the undesirable element (aren't those something from Berkeley?), and click "Hide" ("display: none;" property). As with the header bar on Matt West's blog.