An interesting concept. Frankly I've toyed around with the idea for some time. However, for me the biggest benefit is having all my conversations in *one* place. In order to replace that with a social tool would mean binding myself to it. Thats like choosing orkut over facebook or vice-versa. Personally, I'd like to keep my feet dipped in both, thank you. Why? Because I like to have the the choice.

Although I see that happening with the younger generation, I have my doubts of the elder (not *older* generation) changing its mindset on that one. But i suppose only time can tell :)

Nice topic though.

mskadu

I would absolutely recommend an IM program of some sort for fast paced deliberation. At the moment, the person I mostly do this with does it entirely with email, and it works, but it's slower, more unwieldly, and it's much harder to follow the conversation.

Also, forums? Great for collaborative projects when lots of brainstorming and compiling is necessary. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person I know who is very comfortable with forums. Everyone else seems to be from before those days or after.

dunvi

I'm not sure about replacing email with other forms of electronic messaging (it's all the same to me) but using a company wiki would be a good idea for issues that affect multiple areas.

As for the phone call, I'm a big fan. I've always had a '3rd response' rule. If the text / email has hit 3 responses on the same general topic, I place a phone call because clearly there's enough to be discussed.

Norcross

I tend to check my email a lot more frequently than my blog comments or my edits on various wikis, and there's a lot of people who do the same. Therefore, I doubt that social networking tools will ever entirely replace email.

realitytvfanatic

I'm not convinced that replying via social networking tools and the like is really reducing the problem, more moving it. It's definitely the case that certain issues could be better thrashed out on a communal scratchpad such as a wiki, and announcements could be made via a blog, and that this would free up email for more direct and personal communication. On the other hand, many people would probably rely on email or RSS notifications for the wiki and blog, cancelling out these benefits!

Kylotan

i have been lucky enough to follow luis' efforts from the beginning. At first, I thought it was nothing short of revolutionary and super organised. There's a very strong argument for not using your enmail inbox as a work stack.

However, after thinking it through - he's really just replacing one tool, with several others - and imposing unwanted disciplines on his clients.

The direct opposite of his effort would be "Hey, dont bother having to read my blog, or following my twitter, or waiting to catch me on IM - just send me an email and I'll pick it up !"

And to me, thats more attractive.....my email program is integrated with my calendar, my collegues calender, my to-do list etc.

but then, I'm not a "social computing evangelist"

doublej

As someone who now works at a company making a popular enterprise wiki and blogging tool (Confluence), it was totally new to me as a business tool when I started.

I have learned that it does not replace email entirely of course, but does offer a superior way of carrying on some of those conversations. For in a wiki/blog the conversation allows for broader opt-in participation, an easy platform to dress up or formalize the outcome of the conversation and all of that is forever searchable by users with permission. I've used a lot of business tools over the years and its weird to see one that is so simple yet can be so effective.

woldage

As someone who now works at a company making a wiki / blogging tool (Confluence), it was all new to me prior. I've found it certainly doesn't eliminate email but it does take some conversations that would occur normally in an email to the wiki or blog. That's a huge benefit sometimes as you can get greater opt-in type participation, the results can easily be dressed up for a more formal stance or process and the entire conversation and results are forever search-able. I've also found that it greatly reduces (almost eliminates) my use of MS Word.

woldage

@realitytvfanatic: 10 years ago didn't you check you fax and VM more often than your email?

I've toyed with a wiki for my office, and its been fairly unsuccessful. Most people don't like to learn new technologies. Still, the promise of having a great deal of information in one place keeps me from abandoning the idea.

gardenlevel

Unfortunately, all of my friends are on MySpace, and none of them even touch their emails anymore. Therefore, if I want to stay in touch, I'm forced to use MySpace. *sigh*

So yes, social networking sites can (and for some, have already) replace email.

Cornflakes

The easy answer is no. I think for most people, no matter how young and social-web proficient they are, email is that cornerstone, the touch point of their online identities.
For me, the promise of communicating through friendfeed and tools like it is great and incredibly inviting, but I've had a bear of a time getting friends to join in on the fun. Email will always be the key to everything else.

madthoughts

Since when is email NOT a social tool? I guess I just don't feel that I'm in the "grip" of email... it's just another tool, one that can be used--or mis-used--depending on who you are (or who you're getting email from ;D).

GlennA

wiki's and blogs make it hard to follow a topic of discussion. also to keep track of its latest comment/update, you'd have to rss it anyways, and probably have that sent to your email. so it's redundant. most folks want to have linear discussion about issues, and then also have an archive, b/c people forget, and need to reference the email again.

this whole inbox zero is an illusion of productivity. just because you have no emails doesn't mean you're more on top of your life.

Rather, the correct direction is what gmail started with. Just give everyone the ability to store all their emails and then put a great search on top of it. on top of that, group emails by conversation, and provide fast ways of emailing (hotkeys).

this works for me. I don't care if I have 100 unread emails. what matters more is that I know what my priorities are (using labels and the remember the milk firefox extension) and that I can find that email that includes the details of what i'm trying to recall.

qrius

The company where I used to work used wikis and databases quite a bit, and it worked fairly well. However, it was mostly for long-term reference material, not a replacement for email.

What struck me about this article was that the author was imposing his needs and his priorities over other people's. I like email because I can answer it on my own schedule. If I'm really "in the zone" and working on a project, I don't check my email until I'm done. Anything that comes in while I'm working can wait.

But if someone comes to my desk and asks me a question, or calls me on the phone, or IM's me, I have to stop working, break my concentration and focus on the interruption. I don't want to let my phone ring without answering, or turn off my IM program, because if there really was an emergency, that's how people would reach me. But most of the time, it's NOT urgent, and even if I ignore an incoming IM message, or tell the person on the phone that I can't talk right now, the damage is done. I've lost my train of thought and I have to spend several minutes getting back into my work.

The author of this article is choosing not to use email, but instead, he's imposing his interruptions on all of his coworkers, whether they want them or not.

kwheless

Frankly, this sounds painful. I've watched multiple wikkis/blogs fail because of disinterest. My current employer encourages us to not send docs via email but reference people to Share Point but then nothing is tagged/indexed properly so people send links to docs in Share Point which is just one more step that I have to take to find my information. I don't want to have to watch multiple systems in real-time to see if information I am interested in is passing by. I think 80% of email clutter could be resolved by walking the fifteen feet to talk to the person in question or by picking up the phone or sending an IM. If I know it's going to take 5 minutes to search a "social" engine to find my information or 30 seconds to IM someone that has their finger on that information...well, it's a no brainer.

jayheavner

My answer will be short: no. Email is more convenient, more personal and more formal. in case of casual communication, the only thing even remotely comparable to the convenience of email is IM, but that's only useful when the other's around (otherwise, i prefer email)

surfmadpig

Ummm i do not think social tools could replace email. I am sure it would help and reduce email work, but substitute it for complete, i do not think so. Email is something more formal i we needed for some private communications. Blogging, wikis and so more are for distributed work and I complete agree that helps a lot, but lets be realistic email is something we need in our day life.

ChambrasWeed

I have to agree with timepiece on this as the messages are fragmented you effectivelly have a double interuption to your workflow. The authors approach seems to be nagging coworkers into a response. As I work in education the idea of using social sites for communication seems fraught with pitfalls. Any communication of any real importance or interest would have to happen within a closed system.

vileboy

I also find the fragmentation of messaging to be annoying. I do belong to several social networks, and get notified when I have a new message by email, but I'm always annoyed that they can't *include* the message in the email - first, so I don't have to go through a second step to see it, and second, so all my messages will be searchable in one place. I know at some point I'll want to refer to a message from someone and not be able to find it in my email because they sent it through one of the social networks - and that's going to be seriously annoying.

I can see the value of two areas - one public and one private. In other words, an email address and a web page/blog (wait, wasn't that what I had in 1998?).

timepiece

Ironically, the only way I would dissolve all of my emailing into social networking tools... would be if there was some master bridge between all of those tools...

zac.ice9

You get as many forwards of videos with dogs falling over drunk in social networking as you do with email. So the leap wouldn't be that grand. However, the assumption that people would only be using the site work just to clarify the latest memo from corporate would be a huge underestimation. Curiosity knows no bounds.

Stylist_Mick

Using my company's SharePoint site, I've attempted to post on the wiki, share my docs, publish blog entries, etc...and it still seems to me that the majority of my co-workers don't want to jump on board. I'm spending more time redirecting them to where the data is easily accessible than just flat-out answering their questions. So, the way I see it (at least where I am now), this will never become a reality. sigh...I need to work for Google.

pkelly08

As a college student, I worship at the altar of Facebook. Facebook is faster and easier than sending and e-mail, especially because everyone checks their Facebook multiple times daily. The iPhone and Facebook Mobile make it easy for everyone to access their account on the go. I have had professors, coaches, and administrators create Facebook profiles and groups to more easily stay in touch with students. Will it replace e-mail? I doubt it. It will be a useful personal tool, but professionally, I'm not sure I would like my boss to see some of the less than business-like photos some of my friends post....

ajhirning

I love this. If most of your communication is internal between coworkers, IM can be faster and more helpful. Wikis work well for version control on documents, and phone conversations between colleagues.

Everyone has to be on board with it for it to work out well, and by picking up the phone, you're also leaving yourself open to the thing that I hate more than email, voicemail.

lilithim

@kwheless: agreed completely. email, you can think about, write, and address to specific people. myspace, blogs, whatever, address a big crowd, and you don't know who read it. it's only good for unimportant information like, "what am i doing right now?" and honestly, most of the time, I don't care! I like my friends and etc, but I have enough of my own life. I am not always wanting to know what so and so did. if I did, I would call and ask or email and they can get back to me when they want to.

this whole thing of checking facebook, myspace every 10 mins is absurd and counter productive. email lets you check only when you actually get email.

also, a general statement about facebook and myspace. I believe they only give you much of the illusion of being very connected, but ask yourself, how many of them are real friends that would sit down with you and want to talk with you by dedicating their time, rather than just their online 'status'?

I think it's far better to devote more time with and cultivating relationships to true friends, rather than updating mass amounts of friends generically about your life.

just my 2 cents. sorry had to rant on it. yes, it's been bugging me.

qrius

@jayheavner: we use sharepoint, and I only have one comment. It sucks. It doesn't do any one thing well. We have the 2003 version fyi.

qrius

Priority: If it's something you need immediately, communicate by phone or face-to-face. I'll see an instant message or Twitter before I check my email, and I'll check email before I rummage through wiki discussions or forums.

Avoid duplication: If you can *prevent* an email/phone/IM, by having an available wiki or FAQ, doesn't that save everyone's time? If/when you get an email about a question that is answered in the FAQ/Wiki, politely answer it, and include the link for next time.

I don't worry about conversations not being in one place. I've gotten adept at disruptive technology and following conversations regardless of medium. But I don't think anything will ever *replace* email.

rorowe

@jayheavner: SharePoint or any content management systems are only as good as its user base. It takes a major organizational shift to transition from an email-based communication to a more collaborative wiki/social media intranet type of forum.

That said, I communicate almost exclusively with my social circle through facebook. We invite each other to birthday parties, events, recommend restaurants, etc.

Daniel Hoang

I don't know if social networking will completely take over email's place but a lot of my messaging back and forth has come from social networking sites. My solution is simply have facebook push new messages to my email then my email gets pushed to my WinMo phone. That way I can use pocket outlook to centralize all of my messages whether they come via a social network or a legitimate email address. Great way to stay connected.

spimoles

Email remains the killer app.

onesix18

I actually quit facebook for the sole reason that my friends seem to have forgotten how to use all other forms of communication, including email, IM, and the phone. I was never a big fan of facebook in the first place, and having to use it as a communication tool got really annoying.

Now, since people are forced to contact me in some other way, I only hear about the important things, and don't have to read about who said what to whom, and whether or not someone is bored right now.

saffyre9

again i have installed wikis and even sharepoint but noone wants to use it...!

gorilly

I think the key to using all these communication tools successfully (email and IM included) is mental discipline. Quite generally, if a person using a technological tool doesn't include a bit of mental discipline in the equation, things can easily balloon out of control. In a bygone era we might have just turned off xbiff; now we have to do a lot more filtering of information, and Moore's Law is only partly to blame.

The important thing is to politely let users of various tools know when you're not available (on the phone/IM/email/etc.), and to stick to your guns on that - which can be hard, but politeness really helps. Otherwise, as a worker you can never get enough uninterrupted time to do the deep, longitudinal thinking that's necessary to solve hard problems. I call it "managing people's expectations"; my suspicion is that this workflow principle isn't just limited to academia, the sector in which I work.

Modern science suggests that different brains will appreciate different tools. The best advice I've heard is to try as many as you think you might use. You might be surprised by what actually works for you. Lifehacker is a good guide to what to try. Personally, I think RSS is a particularly useful tool, as is dividing email into a few different buckets (I have four: work, family, friends, geek).

Another point is that the degree of formality of email is really in the eye of the beholder. I suspect that older people think of email as a lot like writing a letter (longhand, or at the typewriter). Younger people like today's undergraduates, by contrast, apparently treat email as a very informal medium!

I think of email as just one tool, which may not be around forever. It should be primary among comms tools only if it earns that distinction by being the most useful, IMHO.

kiwinerdgrrl

I think if my company were to utilize Twitter to let all the higher-ups know what's going on and where they are at would be an amazing idea, it's just implementing it at a place where technology scares people that's the real question, lol.

codeblue315

Thanks much, Kevin, for picking up the NYTimes piece I wrote and for adding further up into an exhilarating exchange of thoughts, ideas, experiences on how to keep productivity higher than ever. I must say that it is going to be almost impossible for me to answer every single comment already shared in here, but I will be capturing some further thoughts from this blog post comments, along with others, and share some more insights in my own blog over at [www.elsua.net]

For now, just wanted to share some thoughts along the lines of the discussion put together so far. I think that one of the items that we seem to keep confusing quite a bit is communication vs. collaboration. No doubt, e-mail is a good communication tool, most of the time, but it is not a very good tool as a collaborative one, specially if you compare it to others within the area of social computing tools, for instance.

At the same time, the single item that got me started with this was not my daily job, on the contrary, my most immediate teams & communities I belong to are already moving away from e-mail, but everyone else outside of my immediate teams, more than anything else because I have always felt that collaboration is all about openness, about taking ownership, about taking responsibility and not delegating tasks to others when you can help collaboratively achieve them all, about not hiding away behind a closed, locked up system, and somehow I feel that e-mail has never fit in the profile, probably will never do.

Like I said, impossible to answer every single commenter (Appreciated all of the input, though, for upcoming blog posts), but one thing I can certainly share with everyone out there is that ever since I started moving away from e-mail to collaborate with other knowledge workers, I do have a strong sense I am much more productive. Yes, I know, to me there isn't a way back! Nothing like coming back from an extended vacation and finding out that you don't have any single e-mail in your inbox, and you haven't even brought with you your blackberry. That, to me, folks, is priceless, and worth while on its own.

elsua

All of my friends and family use FaceBook which is great for catching up and sharing pictures, but I think I still like using email for work and other more formal things.

jessyz

@woldage: We just started using Confluence wiki at our company as a corporate collaboration / knowledge base tool, and so far it has been very cool. Adoption is slowly gaining ground, you just have to convince people that it is better to create content in the wiki for all to see and edit rather than using Word and emailing it 'round and 'round for updates.

Wikis certainly won't replace email, but for many tasks it provides a better solution. With email, the content of the messages is eventually lost or hard to find (and only by those in the email chain). With a wiki, the information is captured for all to see and revise, and becomes a living document. Good stuff in the corporate world.

We also have some people using Twitter, and while it mostly works out for people reporting project status and tasks that they are working on, I'm not so certain it is for everyone. I'm sort of trying it out again, but don't really find anything I can't live without (or do with tools I already have). Plus, the Twitter service is going through some major growing pains right now, and seems a bit spotty.

My company has some people who are very involved in this "Enterprise 2.0" movement (Web 2.0 and social software in the enterprise) and have a blog here if you are interested in more: [www.e2oh.com]

Michael Kizer

I might use Facebook more for e-mail replacement if they allowed me to have an auto-response asking people to e-mail me.

What about open standards? Just because Facebook allows you to e-mail anyone through their interface doesn't mean it will allow it tomorrow. How are you going to export/save any important messages? No way to import/export, much less on a common level.

What happens when spam really start hitting any of these providers? You would have to rely on the vendor for the solution, or custom engineer 10 different solutions.

[sarcasm]Hmm, I have an idea. What if these different social websites could talk to each other in some way. Your Facebook would message someone at MySpace... let's say using a firstname.lastname@MySpace format. Your blog could ping you an update to your Facebook at first.last.university++Facebook.

If only we have a common way to send messages to different computer systems. If only I was at MIT in the 1960's, maybe, someone would have to take some time to think of a solution.[/sarcasm]

A similar question "When will Skype take over the telephone system?"

The answer: never.

Kraft

For those folks interested, I have now taken the liberty of expanding further on the commentary shared over here from the various posters and have created two additional blog posts adding further up into the conversation. They are quite extensive and lengthy (Which is why I haven't shared them over here), but they would provide folks with some additional input as to why I started what I started 5 months ago, and, most importantly, why I am planning on keeping it going for good!

Happy 4th of July to those celebrating!

elsua