We've played around with a few different notification systems at Flashbang/Blurst. It started with our scrolling LED sign, which would display commits along with text-to-speech on the office speakers (video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJer51_DoFc).
Over time, though, we started putting more and more stuff into Growl. We get Growl--via the network stuff--for all kinds of things now. This lets people configure it how they want, disable projects they don't care about (each project shows up independently in Growl), and isn't as disruptive all of the time.
We also use a Google Talk conference bot running an account on our Google Apps, powered by: http://coders.meta.net.nz/~perry/jabber/confbot.php . If we had the bot running first we would've probably used that rather than Growl.
We still use the sign for some fun things--we had it doing real-time sales notification of our iPhone games (which talk back to our server), but that became too distracting too quickly. For parties we turn on a webcam and let people type messages into it.
Long comment short, if you don't have real-time notification of source control commits and things--even if you're in the same room--you're missing out on something very useful.
Re: your youtube video... I've put up LED signs at work before, but they suffer the problems that:
(a) you need to look at it. Mental polling.
(b) It can show a small amount of text. There is little summary information (that we deal with) which benefits. Either boolean data that could be shown with a single light or lots of data that needs more space. Is it really useful, or more of a novelty?
Also, isn't the text-to-speech somewhat interrupting?
Over time, though, we started putting more and more stuff into Growl. We get Growl--via the network stuff--for all kinds of things now. This lets people configure it how they want, disable projects they don't care about (each project shows up independently in Growl), and isn't as disruptive all of the time.
We also use a Google Talk conference bot running an account on our Google Apps, powered by: http://coders.meta.net.nz/~perry/jabber/confbot.php . If we had the bot running first we would've probably used that rather than Growl.
We still use the sign for some fun things--we had it doing real-time sales notification of our iPhone games (which talk back to our server), but that became too distracting too quickly. For parties we turn on a webcam and let people type messages into it.
Long comment short, if you don't have real-time notification of source control commits and things--even if you're in the same room--you're missing out on something very useful.