Gnome 2.30 was released a few days ago which means the next version will be (or should be) Gnome 3 (which will come with Gnome Shell). I recently came across some Notification Area mockups which might become reality.

Gnome 3 might start using monochrome colors in the System Status Area - Ubuntu style (or we could call it Mac OSX style):

Gnome Shell is the new core user interface for Gnome 3 which provides switching windows and applications but you've probably already heard of it by now so I'll skip the introduction.

Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It comes with a lot of additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area.

one thing i have always wished for is the ability to run thunderbird in the background so that if i close is i want it to minimize to the system-tray/notification area and inform me real time when i have a new mail.

"Reporters Without Borders prefers a continuation of the status quo in international Internet governance rather than the creation of an inter-governmental system to replace the existing oversight by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a California-based non-profit..."

Having a notification when new email arrives can be nice and really useful if you're waiting for an important message. But if you're using a desktop email client or maybe a third party webmail service, you might not want to run a big client application or have to keep checking that tab in Firefox to see if new mail has arrived.

Notification Area applet is a nifty tool that lets you keep an eye on application activity of your Gnome desktop. Quite often new users tend to accidental it in the applet adding and removing frenzy that we all succumb to one time or other.

saidar is a text based tool for viewing the system statistics available through libstatgrab. Statistics include CPU, processes, load, memory, swap, network I/O, disk I/O, and file system information.

Alltray is a free opensource tool to dock any application with no native tray icon (like Evolution, evoluThunderbird, Terminals) into the system tray. A high-light feature is that a click on the ‘close’ button will minimize back to system tray. It works well with Gnome, KDE, XFCE 4, Fluxbox and WindowMaker.