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The last time you cleaned out your inbox, how many of those emails were auto-generated notifications from social networks and other websites? Unless you're particularly aggressive about turning off default notifications, it was probably more than a few. You've been meaning to get around to going through and changing all those settings, but - oh hey, hang on, there's another email.

Editing the notification settings on a few big Web services doesn't sound like a big deal, and in reality it's not. But in all the digital, real-time chaos of life online, it's easy to put off. You might zap one when you think of it, but what about the rest of them? Are you really going to sit there, hunt them all down and annihilate them?

Mobile services company Urban Airship and location provider SimpleGeo are today announcing a new partnership that will help mobile developers access the strengths in both systems. The companies' goal is to provide developers with the ability to send out geo-targeted, geo-fenced, personalized push notifications. These "smarter" notifications represent the next phase in mobile messaging, say the companies.

"We think the next generation of smarter apps will be here in about the next 18 months," says Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship.

All the time on the Web, things are happening. Comments are being left, blogs updated, messages sent, tweets tweeted, and so on. If you're an information junkie, then you don't want to know later, you want to know now.

One way of knowing now is setting up a mobile notification app, like Boxcar, to let you know the moment everything happens when you're out and about. But what about if you're sitting at your desk? For that, the company has just released a desktop version of Boxcar for the Mac and the app is soon on its way to a number of other devices and platforms.

It can be the bane of a SysAdmin or software engineer's world: those late night notices that a server's crashed, that a key process is suddenly returning critical errors. Even worse, arguably, is a lack of notifications. Then you get in to work on Monday to find that the person on call "didn't get the message" and things have been broken since 5:01 Friday night.

PagerDuty, a Y-Combinator funded startup, offers a service that collects alerts from your various monitoring tools and makes sure the right person is notified if there's a problem.

Do you want to be notified of Android notifications like calls, text messages, low battery alerts and more when you're on your computer? An open source mobile application called "Android Notifier" does this by connecting your mobile phone's notification system to the notification system on your computer. The desktop application currently works on Mac only, via the popular notification app, Growl. The project's developer says the Linux port will arrive "soon" and he's looking for volunteers who will connect the app to Windows systems as well.

But he needn't bother. We came across another application called the "Android-Notifier-Desktop" which offers a multi-platform desktop client for the above mobile app to the overlooked Linux and Windows users.

Below is the complete installation guide to using both of these apps on your computer. 

Extensions for Google Chrome can now send out desktop notifications. Google just announced the availability of a notifications API for Chrome extension developers. Until now, only websites were able to deliver non-model messages with the notifications API, which was first introduced in Chrome 4 for Windows. Now, extension developers will be able to make use of the desktop notifications API to deliver notifications that appear outside of the browser window as well.

It was announced Tuesday that email management startup SendGrid had raised $5 million in Series A financing from a handful of prominent investors, including Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, Dave McClure, David Cohen and Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg. SendGrid, a graduate of last year's summer TechStars program, launched last fall and raised some seed funding from many of the same investors on its way to sending nearly 1.2 billion emails for its over 4,000 clients.

Facebook is about to become a quieter, less annoying place for users. The company just announced that it has deprecated "application notifications" and will require apps to use other, less intrusive methods of sending news to users. It's a big step in the ongoing anti-MySpace-ification of Facebook. Though to be fair, MySpace recently instituted something similar. Now your "notifications" section on Facebook will just be for things like comments left on your posts.

It's a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization.

Notifications combines push notifications for Twitter, email, and any RSS feed into one iPhone app. While we have tested quite a few push notification apps in the past, including some great apps like Boxcar and GPush, none of these offer the flexibility of Notifications. While it still has a few flaws and takes a while to set up, Notifications offers a number of features other apps don't offer, including the ability to get notified of new tweets with specific keywords. The app costs $2 and is available in the App Store now.

RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality.