e-mail = primordial human activity
Not everyone thinks the days of e-mail are numbered. Robert Hamilton and Ben Bradley write in Darwin Magazine about the how ingrained e-mail is to how we work. And, rather than fight it, they suggest one direction may be in creating environments which work seamlessly with email. They focus on collaboration and mention Kubi specifically. There are others, such as Groove and a number of application-specific plug-ins.
The following paragraph is an entertaining description of the problem. Collaboration & The Problem With E-mail
Because of human communication habits (defaulting back to the most convenient method), the e-mail client for many has become a personal knowledge management tool â€$(D s(Bomething it was never designed to do. E-mail really is proof that you can hammer in a nail with a screwdriver. Despite the arrival of some truly amazing tech tools in recent years, e-mail remains the most pervasively deployed and used application. E-mail can be thought of as primordial human activity that links us to the internetworked ecosystem. As such, e-mail habits are the most stable habits among technology users.(emphasis mine)
3 Comment(s)
I don't think email's days are numbered at all, except perhaps for small and specific groups of people. It's part of the foundation of the Internet and the world of work. There will be alternatives, but it won't be replaced.
I suspect the vast majority of people crying out in favor of the death of email are neither well trained in email management nor using good clients.
Unfortunately there are few social forces that move people in the direction of good skills or good tools (at least with email). Most normal computers come with a poor email client that has what appears at first glance to be reasonable to be a reasonable interface.
For a group of people who have agreed to a certain set of behaviors with email use, email can be a _very_ powerful collaborative and learning tool.
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KJolt Memberships
The days are numbered, but the change won't happen overnight. That's why Socialtext works seamlessly with email too.