The "notification" problem boils down to this: many want your attention; you only want to give attention to what is relevant to you, at a particular time. What is signal some times is noise others. It's not just NOISE Versus SIGNAL. It's NOISE Versus SIGNAL for USER X at TIME Y.

configuring preferences for this problem takes time and dedicated thought (when they're even available to be customized!), resources that users have been reluctant to spend on personal technology. The example in the article was really just due to wrongly selecting a "send me messages" option; THAT bad user decision produced enough frustration to write the OP. This will compound and be very frustrating eventually for 'bad operators'; if you don't have spam properly filtered out of this feed or that one, it compounds at the phone-notification level. In viewing technology, I don't really like saying "well, they're just a bad user", it smacks of Jobs' comment on the iphone 4: "you're just holding it wrong".

This problem is not distinct to an individual mobile user overloaded with notifications. We have this problem in every service we interact with that provides a regular stream of information. In email, this started as SPAM and NOTSPAM as the only measure. If it's from a human, it's relevant. There's one step further with this in Gmail with "important" notification (based on who sent it and what you open). Mobile notifications make a good example of the problem, because they are the final layer of "what is relevant" filtering between so many info services and a single user. Even with binary on/off for many of those streams, the problem remains, and compounds with expectedly careless users.

Automating relevancy measurement will be one of the more "creepy" technologies, I believe, because of the nature of human memory. We will find very quickly that a computer can be "better" (er... faster and more user-aware) at deciding what we want to look at than we ourselves are.

We will also find that the computer can, through micro-decisions, drive a particular thought or behavior pattern. By tending to ignore "health-related" notifications because you are personally uncomfortable with them and view them less than other notifications (as an example), it could exacerbate that problem by further obfuscating such notifications based on that preference. OR, the opposite: have a predisposition to ignore money notifications because of income apprehension? Computer knows and compensates, notifying for these personal weak points more urgently. These examples are strained, but they express the idea.

Compare to facebook's microdecisions to show you more or less of your ex-lover's posts soon after breaking up. These could vastly affect a person's behavior, and we trust in the "know by wire" system to do what is "best" for us.

We've outsourced the relevancy for news events to journalists, editors, and individual publications for hundreds of years ("I'm a WSJ man", for example). the ability for technology to challenge that relationship is just beginning to come into its own. The need for a journalist at the bottom level of "event or not" decision making is still necessary (this is changing too, but still necessary), but publications are now more like buckets of particular editorial opinion and style that are churned together on other platforms than they are decisions of "this stream or that" that users make.

What I see is a need that every technology user shares on many platforms, and a moral hazard of sorts for whoever develops a solution for that need. We already trust in facebook and google to show us what is most "relevant" to us, to not manipulate us for profit. As we rely more and more on automated measures of relevancy, we put more and more trust into their making such measures benevolently.