Sure, if you've worked out problems and generic structures for Moodle its useful. A lot of code has changed between 1.9 and 2.0 but a lot of the underlying ideas are also the same.

As Stuart has said, I am implementing this atm. I thought about writing a message output plugin, but decided against this for these reasons:

1. We want separation of data and presentation.

2. We want to build an activity stream web service for other applications, such as our student portal, to consume.

3. We want more event notifications than are currently sent as messages.

I have not written a technical specification, but the general idea is:

1. Build a local plugin that listens for events and populates a notification table.

2. Write a block that displays the notifications and incorporates a YUI infinite scroll (sorry Stu - need to be Moodleish. Though if I get stuck I may consider wrapping the Paul Irish jQuery plugin in YUI)

3. Adapt our theme to also display the notifications a la Moodlerooms.

I'll put the work so far in github and post a link this weekend. I only decided on this approach today, so please view it as a work in progress that is very happy to receive critique.

Not sure how close I am to the Joule spec but we don't have time to wait for it. :/

Ta

When we put our "recent updates" system live our users requested a method to mark all as read. I haven't seen that documented here so you might want to add it to any plans you have.

Also the scope of our recent updates is less complicated then the one proposed by moodlerooms. It basically notifies you when an asset (resource or activity module instance) has been added or modified by another user and when a forum post has been added to a forum you are subscribed.

Moodle messages are handled in a different custom alert system (see image below).

And we haven't attempted to add tutor administrative notifications such as assignments and grades, although notifications of this type are included on the users' front page.