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Why would anyone want to be notified whenever they get an email? People are already incessantly and compulsively checking their email every few minutes, to the detriment of their sociability.

This makes email less fun. The few seconds of anticipation when you hit the refresh button on the email client and it starts downloading emails are enthralling; Did that girl from Match.com reply? or is it yet another spam from Amazon/Dell?

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I hate the idea of being notified of each individual message. Considering how often it's an automated e-mail or somebody copying me in to something rather than something actually useful... well, for my use of e-mail it's a pointless distraction.

Still, I wouldn't mind having the unread count on my iPhone's Mail icon be accurate, instead of a half-hour out of date. I'll probably enable this sometime soon and continue to leave new mail notifications off.

I've found that push-style notifications actually make me check things less, not more. I hit refresh on Twitter every few minutes 'till I turned on SMS, I kept popping gmail tabs open every 5 minutes until I eventually just left the tab running in the browser window. I kept checking blogs every day until I found RSS.

Now I don't have to visit those places all the time, they bring the info directly to me.

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