Notifications in Ubuntu

On Canonical's design blog, Matthew Paul Thomas writes:

Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area (a.k.a. “system tray”), because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior.

It's probably a good call. I think the source of the problem is that, as it gets used by more and more applications, any notification system will eventually become overwhelmed with unimportant notifications. This causes people to become blind to the whole system.