Comment 4 for bug 539267

I get this too on Lucid. I tried to give Empathy a week because it's the default, but it's unusable without notifications.

Someone could be trying to talk to me for hours, and I'd have little way of knowing. I don't find out until I manually bring the contact list to the foreground and notice the blinking icon next to their name. Though once the chat window is open, I start getting brief notification bubbles with each incoming message. Even then it's still easy to miss things.