I find it time consuming to see if any of the components/modules that I use have been updated. When I was using "Legend of the Green Dragon" (dragonprime.net), I found that they have a pretty good system for alerting people of updates and I thought it might be helpful to the Joomla community as well (perhaps for 1.5?)
Every module that is built has a 'version.txt' that they put in their module package. By going to a particular page in the administrator, it then connects to a set, hard-coded link that would parse the version.txt and tell you if you were up to date or outdated.
Obviously, two things would have to be done as a community:
- Everyone would need to begin including a version.txt (or other similar file) in their modules
- Links to the version.txt would need to be static so that it could connect easily
Not sure if this is something that the team wants to look into, but just throwing it out there