The Most UnGRANDtastical Events to Never Occur

Windows Phone Notifications: Not Quite There Yet

With the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update, there have been a ton of features added, lots of new functionality, and fine tuning everywhere you look.  One of the most welcome additions is the centralized notifications center under the ‘Me’ tile, finally. Push notification reliability has also improved which was a common issue pre-Mango.  Unfortunately, there are still some very prominent holes that aren’t very Windows Phone-like.

Centralized Notifications 

One of the best bits of functionality introduced with Mango is the ‘Notifications’ pivot found under the ‘Me’ tile.  Here you can see Facebook notifications for Wall, picture, and link posts, comments, and likes.  It also shows Twitter mentions and retweets. The best part is, you can even reply right from within the integrated experience, as well as see the other comments on the particular item.  There are a number of LinkedIn notifications too.

What it doesn’t do is show notifications for Facebook Groups, though a couple have shown up in the beta, so it proves the functionality is there.  It also doesn’t thread Twitter replies, again, something I’ve seen happen in the beta.

The one thing I don’t understand why it’s missing is app Push notifications.  If you aren’t looking at your phone or don’t pick it up soon after a Push notification is received you will never know you got it unless you have the app pinned to your Start screen provided it has a Live tile and/or counter.

They really just need to show up under the ‘Me’ tile along with all the other notifications.

Push and Toast Notifications for Integrated Services

This omission is the most inconvenient, especially for Twitter users since the Twitter app doesn’t push notifications at all.  The Facebook app does have a limited set of Toast notifications, but the problem with those is they throw you into the Facebook app as opposed to the integrated experience WP7 offers.

For Twitter notifications like mentions and retweets, you have to rely on emails.  From there you have three options: click “Reply to @xxxxxx” and be taken to the Twitter website, navigate to and lunch the Twitter app, or navigate to the ‘Notifications’ pivot under the ‘Me’ tile.  None of which are ideal.

Windows Phone just needs its own Push and Toast notifications for integrated services. I’m sure we will see these things in the future, it only makes sense.  

Other Things I Hope to See in the Future

• Being able to ‘Pin’ social network groups, like from Facebook and Windows Live, to your Start scree for live tile updates.  There could be a ‘Groups’ pivot in the ‘People’ hub that show all the groups across your social networks.  Creating groups within those networks are a lot easier than doing so on your phone.  Plus, those groups aren’t stuck on the phone they were created on.  There is currently no way to sync groups to Windows Live or the Zune desktop software or connector for Mac.
• Foursquare integration: check in, live tile updates, and Toast notifications, the whole shabang.  It would also be nice to see who is currently checked in from a locations card within Bing. As well as, see if friends have checked in there in the past or ‘liked’ it on Facebook.