We need a few simple features, each related to the previous:
1) Notify a group of people regarding the start of a conversation, but not each subsequent message in the conversation.
2) Show at a glance if there are unread messages of genuine interest. So allow easily dismissing a whole conversation.
3) Dismissing on your phone should dismiss on your computer and vice versa.
I have a sense of why the feature 1 is hard: people aren't good at selecting threads of conversation. There are three remedies:
- make the UI more clear, perhaps automatically labeling each thread with an automatically generated subject
- make it possible to change the thread that a message is in, after the message was already "sent"
- changing the thread is too late for sounds triggered by notifications, but they could update the "keep up-to-date" style interface of feature 2 above.
- if notifications are actually working like they should, people will be more motivated to get the thread right in order to get the notification right.
