I would urge everyone reading and commenting in this thread to experiment with Gist (http://gist.com).

E-mail and ESSPs both have their own usefulness. I feel, E-mail is for communication while ESSPs are for collaboration.

E-mail works best when there is a simple need of communicating with someone or send message to a large number of people at once (like Office memos, Announcements etc.,). It is very hard to miss an e-mail and hence the message it carries. It can also be a very effective tool to get answers/information from someone you already know. It still remains one of the most successful Internet applications. E-mail is of utility value.

Whereas, ESSPs, by their very design, lend themselves more natrurally to human interactions than e-mails. They allow people to stay in touch, establish and maintain relationships in more natural ways than e-mails. They help find solutions from even 'unknown' sources, tap onto the collective intelligence of communities. They also align and enable today's business models where enterprises work/collaborate with number of globally distributed partrners, vendors and employees to deliver projects or solve problems (this scale just cannot be met only by e-mails).

Note: Just imagine doing what we are doing right now (reading, responding and learning from this Blog, all at the same time) with e-mails!

I am living the truce with email, but I do think that email will act like a ball and chain on moving toward what could be, and what I think we agree will eventually be.

I think that the mindset for email should be as one to be used as a private communications path, with suggested replacement when possible with private chat and private messaging within chat for asynchronous discussion.

I think one thing we could do to move willing organizations toward limiting email and moving in the direction of other tools would be to disable attachments within email. Replacing them with links to documents in a document management system that is optimized for the media being linked too, (be it images, documents, video etc…). There are some added side benefits to this decision, reduction of the number of the same documents and the associated confusion over updates versions, and changes.

A follow on move may be to declare that email will begin to be indexed and made searchable/discoverable unless it is flagged as personal and private. Encouraging employees to use private chat and chat messages for most of the personal exchanges that take place. This would enable us to start to use the email text strings (now without actual documents embedded). Maybe then email might not be where knowledge goes to die as you so appropriately put it. These emails (now text files) can indexed along with chat room logs (non private) and other text tools as well.

The other uses of email would eventually need to be replaced with arguably better tools as well. Take for example the task list function, or the integrated calendar, meeting makers and the rest of the functionality we have come to love. Until we can point to a better solution in those areas as well, this is going to continue to be an uphill battle.

Then there are the customers and clients, we can change our internal methods and processes, but what about how we interact with our customers?

as the senior guy on the project, I saw the inefficiencies, stress, major chances for error, creative suboptimization, laziness and plain stupidity of jamming this project through via email. but we had a deadline. we were moving fast. “it would all be over soon,” we told ourselves. and we kept pushing – the madness, that is!

we get it, so on monday we're meeting to analyze how the hell we got into that mess and to hopefully re-commit to using all of our 2.0 smarts in the future … which to me means taking a step back and reviewing the human components of our process: project leadership, personal accountabilities, our overall flow itself.

I'm all about inspiring sr. mngmnt about 2.0 through above-the-line, positive benefits. but maybe I should document the chaos we went through to help them see the tremendous waste and team demoralization of our email ordeal. that they might get. it sure lit a new fire under my butt to get our 2.0 act together!

I agree with Daniel P above that email needs to be embraced as part of e2.0. In fact, taking it a step further, those that figure out how to effectively embrace email will enable e2.0 to flourish.

I see two important uses for email – (1) It can be a UI into e2.0 (for some it will be THE UI), and again agree with Daniel that embedded links and media will be critical; being the UI means support for post and reply functionality via email. and (2) it should be an effective notification vehicle (which it is in any viable e2.0 technology today already).

BTW – took you up on connecting on Google Wave … looking forward to Wave's promise.

Email is great for knowledge transport. But as soon as that knowledge needs to be persisted and/or shared, email fails horribly.

And therein lies the E2.0 frontal assault. People need to wake up and realize that email is good for something, but a very specific something.