I had the same idea with trying to provide a dashboard to display software updates but couldn’t find a solution. I reverted to using the FAQ module with an rss feed to a database that houses our software updates.
Still a work in progress… http://support.power-soft.net/public.pl?Action=PublicFAQZoom;ItemID=10
It sure would be nice to have a customer dashboard like the agent dashboard that could display rss feed like the rss module which I have successfully used to display an rss feed of updates to agents.