

None of us is smarter than all of us.
Stephen is Director and founder of Collabor8now Ltd, an organization focussed on developing collaborative environments (e.g. Communities of Practice) and the integration of knowledge management tools and processes to support business improvement. He is a certified knowledge manager with the Knowledge Management Institute (KMI) and the author of several published research papers on collaborative behaviours and information technology.
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Email won’t replace social networks because those two things are designed for different purposes.
Email is designed to convey messages between arbitrary people/mailboxes.
Social networks are, as the name implies, ways of managing graphs of relationships for the purpose of ambient awareness. Many enable messaging but that’s a fairly peripheral use.
But clearly some messaging activity has migrated to social networks. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Technology is rarely a case of Y kills X, especially in the short term.
Adrian, thanks for the comment. Yes, agree. It’s amazing though how much I read about the death of email (Social Media is only the latest in a long list of assassins). In actual fact, my email inbox is if anything much busier because of social networks, since I set various alerts to notify me when a conversation has been updated on a social network. The key thing is to be able to manage information. Email is juts one of many information channels that can take over our lives – if we let it.
Google has at least recognised that email has a continuing part to play. Google Wave attempts to merge email with collaboration tools and social media. Where it falls down is that will not be ubiquitous enough to kill email. I find Wave just yet another place I need to go to to stay in touch – unless I get it to send email alerts.
Gary – yea agree. Still not sure about Google Wave. At the moment it does look like yet one more place to visit to keep in touch with the conversations.