I know that those notifications are annoying, especially when they get mixed up with important e-mail and send you scrambling for your phone, however... How 'b

I know that those notifications are annoying, especially when they get mixed up with important e-mail and send you scrambling for your phone, however... How 'bout you just set a profile photo? It doesn't need to be your face, doesn't even need to be photo. Actually, a distinct avatar would probably work better than a photo. But put something there. It's tiresome to try to follow a conversation without an easy way to distinguish participants. So fire up GIMP, put your initials over your favourite shade of pink and upload it to Twitter/Google+/GitHub/Gravatar/whatever. Or pick a picture from Flickr with a permissive license. Don't punish others with a generic icon. /PSA