"In one sense, Yahoo and Google are doing the same thing - building around an idea that e-mail is here to stay, regardless of the competitors who were considered contenders to unseat e-mail - IM, texting, Twitter, Facebook." - Hutch Carpenter

E-mail can stay as long as it wants, we just need to stop using it as the first option for 95% of our work tasks. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel, I am curious, why is that? Email survives a lot longer than im, twitter, texting etc. due to the format. The protocols are flawed, but i still have emails exchanged in 1998. It's text, standard, easy to save, export, import, transfer - it is also easy to move around as a management. I use email as a communication tool, todo list, set of reminders, prioritisation. I am genuinely curious what you think ought to be used intead - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

@Joelle: Communications should default to public, searchable, and portable formats. Use twitter, a blog, a forum, or a wiki as your first-choice tools. If you've got something with an explicit need for privacy, then by all means use email or a DM or something. Defaulting to private communications like email wastes lots of brainpower and energy in the workplace. http://www.sharingatwork.com/2008... - Daniel J. Pritchett

Yes, Twitter would be my choice if I had to survive with a single digital communication medium. I delete my own ill-planned Tweets a few times a week, for what it's worth. - Daniel J. Pritchett

I'd say Twitter too, due to its versatility. - Hutch Carpenter

We including DMs? - Hutch Carpenter

Hutch! You can't be serious, dude. You really want an order confirmation from your purchase of Britney Spears' new album being broadcast to all your friends? Some things are best left between you and Amazon. - Mark Radigan

Mark - I'm damn proud of my Britney purchases! - Hutch Carpenter

Much of the internal communications at a company wouldn't happen if the medium was public. It's good to let the players bounce ideas around before they publically release them. All public is a good ideal but impractical for most company communications. - Andrew

I'm not sure I follow you - but having run a company I had a lot of communication around dealmaking that worked best in email or in person - not that it needed hiding from employees (i make every place i work in pretty flat and transparent) but it needed the space and attention that goes with email.It could not be lost in the stream or made public easily. I'm all with you that a lot of email (cc's esp.) is wasted and could go in wikis, forums and other places - and we used all of these - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

Chris - DM alone works. I'll include a link to the source document/wiki/app page/etc. - Hutch Carpenter

Chris - email works only one way - private. Twitter can go public or private. As Joelle notes, there are a lot of communications that really should be public. Many people will benefit from them. But the most prevalent communication mode is email, meaning there isn't a good way to expand their visibility. - Hutch Carpenter

OH - yeah, there are lots of valid reasons for maintaining private communications. I wonder percentage that is? Probably varies by company culture and industry. - Hutch Carpenter

I didn't realize my choice of One Medium to Rule Them All was going to be enforced on my entire company. I don't deal with legal or HR issues, I just solve tech/workflow problems. My investigations, deliberations, and solutions are nearly all things I'd love to be able to share and not have to explain over and over again. Sure, let the HR folks and the lawyers use private messages. - Daniel J. Pritchett

actually, email being text and fairly standardised, is quite easy to migrate to anything else - easy to make public as a mailbox/mailing list archive that is browsable, easy to migrate to wikis, easy to turn into a forum or intranet. I still have emails from 1998, the key ones. I cant imagine having 2008 tweets in 2016. Email is incredibly robust as a format. Another robust one is newsgroup posts. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I have nothing against privacy, I just think we're doing ourselves a disservice by defaulting to privacy at work. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Once again the love of Twitter baffles me. If you only had one, you'd really pick the one limited to 140 characters? Personally I'd default to IM for actually communicating - asynchronous, easy to multitask, no inane character limit, and pretty much everyone uses it. For business, there's email, flawed as it might be. Though I like Google's approach of integrating email/IM/voice/video and collaborative apps into a unified experience. - Eric P

@Joelle: If most of everyone's email was online, public (or even 'public' behind the company firewall), and searchable I would love email. Unfortunately it's not. Don't even get me started on the dysfunction of passing copies of MS Office documents back and forth via email rather than collaborating on a single copy of a web document. - Daniel J. Pritchett

@Eric: Making Twitter handle more than 140 characters is a much smaller shift than making e-mail public and persistent. I do love my GMail account though, 841 Mb and rising... - Daniel J. Pritchett

Blogs/RSS = Public + Persistent in a very email-like fashion, without the silly character limit. - Eric P

Chris: SMS limits. - Nathan Howell

my guess was that it had to do with SMS limits in some market, but it is just a guess - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

IM - everyone uses it? I don't use it very much overall actually, and there are so many networks too. I know I can use a multi network client such as Pidgin or Nimbuzz etc. (Personally I use Sykpe and Gtalk, and Gtalk is always on in my Gmail, and on my cellphone too. However, so is my email, and I check it several times a day. Sometimes that 140 character Twitter limit is good in that it forces you to be concise and to the point. - Ian May

Regarding email itself, it's Gmail for me. I don't run ANY local email clients anymore. I don't therefore have any sync issues. I've never been impressed by Outlook myself. Too slow, and bloated. - Ian May

@Ian: Everyone on Facebook, Myspace, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail has an IM account. No question that not everyone uses it, but those numbers dwarf Twitter's adoption level. - Eric P

gmail is the greatest thing since sliced bread -- there, i said it! - Adam Singer