Activity notifications

I know we have these that can get emailed to us, but can we have it put up in the top banner like Facebook does? I try and be active on the site, but often I know I lose track of conversations because they are a comment on someone else's page to an existing entry in their activity feed. Unless I initiate the conversation, thus posting it on my page. Even then, if you are very active conversations scroll off the front page and without always following the links in my email I do not know I've missed something.

So can we just copy the Facebook model so I can see something like "Buckswana commented on Fshguy's post you participated in"?

even though I hate facebook, I like this idea

The first step here needs to be that we get email notified if we participate in a conversation. Having a pending queue would be even better.