"I don't "care" in a theoretical sense, although it does raise some practical issues. I'm not particularly convinced the "VLE as a hub" metaphor is very accurate, the time-honoured "VLE as a filing cabinet" works better, especially as that's how everyone uses it. For those reasons, I'm headed in the FriendFeed direction. Paradoxically, I'm getting more email traffic from students this year than for a long time (which is a pain as it's much more labour-intensive to deal with then other channels). However, little of it is coming through the institutional service, it's coming from a plethora of online services. They also expect realtime replies, even when they email me late at night!" - AJCann