It's not Email vs Social Media, it's tools for jobs

This post http://t.co/pTgTLA79 got me thinking and talking to a couple of customers this morning. In it:

• Mark Zuckerberg talks about replacing email with something more immediate and clearly, for him, Facebook's new messaging service is it. 
• The Microsoft guy then pours cold water on it - understandable given the amount of revenue Microsoft get from licensing Outlook, Exchange and the servers that power corporate mail all over the world. 
• The (ex IBM) guy who invented MIME points to (IBM's) LotusLive, which is lovely and largely irrelevant to most corporates for whom Notes is a tainted if not poisonous chalice of end user computing proliferation.

I totally buy a few things in this article. I think the move towards conversations in a shared, protected environment is going to continue as users see the benefits of being passive participants in conversations; the 'ambient information transfer' argument. Users will also become more comfortable in such an environment, meaning they'll contribute more.

The argumemt, "email vs social media" strikes me as a bit bizarre. It's like saying, "Is a letter better than going to the pub with your mates? Or having a meeting?". 

Well, it just depends what you want to achieve.

For a start, the idea that email is somehow going away doesn't fly - but there are plenty of things done with email today which it isn't that great at. Products will come along that replace things users currently do with email.

This is already happening; before Twitter, how else would you share an interesting link? Blog it? Email out your blog?

And it will happen in other areas.

For example, it gives users control of their workflow; often users will create filing structures within email to allow them to rapidly locate information. I did it myself until around 2008, at which point search and filtering got good enough for me to find what I wanted without filing it. Normally, if I can remember the context of an email then it can be retrieved, even if if means searching on a name, then spinning through a couple of pages. Better than being a filing clerk.

Another example: email is a singularly terrible way to talk about anything to any volume of people. If you're not on the list, you don't know it's happening. If it's in your inbox and nowhere else, it's impossible to share the knowledge. Replies get crossed all the time ("with respect to Dave's point in his third para"). 

A decent collaborative enterprise platform kills both of these uses of email. But it will have to ensure that:

• Collaboration has to be based around work; it has to be in shared data & communication environment rather than simply a messaging environment - it has to be real-time, capable of dealing with multiple conversation threads
• Communities of users are able to freely form and create new knowledge from existing data, so the user community becomes the filing system
• Enterprise search is powerful enough to render filing a waste of time

Email remains pretty good for private communications - personal or enterprise confidential items you don't want to broadcast. (Of course, it's sensible to assume that everything gets leaked eventually.)

But in all other areas, it just needs the right product to topple it.