Maybe something akin to the Facebook way, with a popup buddy list?
That would be uber
I will chime in here and give a bit of info on what we'll working towards. Somewhat like Facebook, I do want to have a status bar that sticks at the bottom of the screen.
Instead of a flashing envelope next to My Stuff when you have a new private message, there would be some type of indicator in the lower bar.
There will be an area that will show how many of your UBB Buddies are currently online, eventually with a way to send them some sort of message. We'll never be able to do a full fledged instant message, but we could do some type of AJAX check similar to the shoutbox that checks to see if you have a new message every 30 seconds or so, even when you're idle.
Also a notification area, things like when someone replies to one of your posts, sends you a private message, posts a comment on your profile, etc. All of those would go into the notification area at the bottom, again similar to facebook's notification. They handle that quite well, so I'd like to do something similar.
I have many, many ideas for improving the user interface, which is why I can't wait to be finished with the CP
