The real-time web is producing interesting developments in how information is pushed to a variety of devices and through different channels (twitter, email, RSS, iPhone/Blackberry push notifications). What seems to be missing, however, is an attention to alert redundancy: when the same information is pushed through multiple channels simultaneously, creating more information management interactions than are strictly necessary (e.g. Mint.com alerts pushed to email & iPhone reached my email first, and was seen there before the iPhone notification arrived.

What is needed is a way to mark alerts as 'read' across channels when they are seen on any one channel, and ways to not send notifications after they've been read on any one channel. This, of course, will need the development of a unified notification infrastructure, ecosystem-aware APIs that allow a person's suite of channels and applications to act in concert, models of network performance, and techniques for context-sensitivity that can make judgements about the appropriateness of generating alerts.

Of course, this is a problem that no one organization can solve, but unless it is, we stand in danger of a worse case of information overload than CrackBerry's ever represented.