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A post-email utopia?
It's the end of the email era, says the WSJ. To paraphrase: In the bad old days we were overloaded by emails coming into the inbox, but in our bright future we'll be taken care of by the tools - Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave, and others - which will do all the work for us. We'll just calmly dip into the river of information when we need it, and otherwise blissfully ignore it all.
Something tells me it's not going to go that way.
Tools are essential - and we need better tools than we have today - but it always raises a flag when I see someone announcing a new utopian era - based on yet more tools. (It's certainly an attractive proposition to the software industry - users ceding more control, and more attention, to more and more and more tools!)
The article covers more than the tools, and makes plenty of good points - worth a read. Just beware the boosterism.
Here are my reasons (five of them) to avoid the hype of Google Wave:
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25758-Google-Wave-Examiner~y2009m10d19-Five-reasons-to-skip-Google-Wave-for-now
You are correct and the WSJ is wrong - see what I wrote last week on this http://www.basexblog.com/2009/10/15/e-mail-reports-of-my-demise-are-premature/
I hope so. I can no longer manage all my email addresses. I spend hours each day reading and responding... and this is with spam control on blocking the junk.
I agree. More tools doesn't equal better life. Was it Bill Gates who said something like the tools will amplify the good or bad that is already there?
In other words, if you don't have a good mental system of dealing with email, more tools will just amplify the poor mental system.
Personally, I like David Allen's GTD approach of dealing with things once and not leaving them in the in-basket. That goes for everything; email, twitter, facebook, rss feeds, mailbox, etc.
I would like to keep the e-mails already, because I absolutely not a fan of Facebook and the others. So I get no spam, I've set my mailbox so that I only get emails from people in my contact list and all mail to another account.