RSS Feed to IM Alerts
The Big in Japan team built a simple tool called InstantRSS. The tool allows you enter an XML web feed (RSS or atom) and receive the feed via your IM client (Jabber, AIM, Google Talk and so on). Here is my thought. We mashup that tool with SimpleTicket - techs can get feeds for alerts (i.e. old tickets - unopened after 30 minutes or not viewed within 12 hours.
We could also offer users the option to receive updates on their ticket via IM. Each time an engineer updated their ticket they would get an IM message from SimpleTicket. This should be easy enough to do manually, I would like to see it baked in. Thoughts?