If I were to take a pole I think we’d all agree, Email is the bane to our existence. How much time do we spend dealing with email that is sucking the life out of your productivity. I know I have other things I’d rather be doing than wading through spam, vendor notifications and the like. It’s time we, on an individual and organizational level take a hard look at our communication modes and break away from the leach known as email.
Here’s a list of 13 alternative communication methods for consideration as a way to ween ourselves from email as our main electronic communication method.
- Wikis – While the best known one is wikipedia, wikis are popping-up on intranets and on the net daily. To get your head spinning, check out wikia.com.
- Blogs – Sites published in blog format are growing exponentially as they provide current, relevant information on focused topics. One can start a blog for free using Tumblr, Blogspot, WordPress, Xanga or a whole plethora of other free offerings. Blogging with interactive comments such as transpires on thoughtsparks.net provides a dynamic discourse over the topics of interest.
- Micro-blogging – Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku are all great examples of mini or micro-blogging. Like blogging, there is the ability to discuss topics in an open forum with quick posts on topics of interest. Micro-blogging has the potential to be an email killer in many respects. There are a good number of new relationships I’ve made online that transpire largely between blog comments and micro-blogging.
- Instant Messenger – Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, GTalk are some of the major services available for instant communication. IM has proven to be a powerful communication method that is inexpensive and effective for quick exchanges that would have drug-out through email.
- RSS – Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is so powerful because it is just that, really simple. With sites such as Bloglines or Google Reader one can feed blogs, news and classifieds such as Craigslist. Companies are now feeding information back to their employees instead of notifying via email.
- Voice Communication – Skype is the best known service available. With business communication more global than ever it’s easy to see why.
- Forums – Everything from general forums like offtopic.com to industry or interest specific like kirupa.com for Flash development, forums provide an excellent resource for a library of answers to problems.
- Social Communities – Social communities have been on the fringe of the business sector, but with the mass movement towards Facebook as a social network and LinkedIn as a professional network, the social community concept within major corporations or associations will not be far behind.
- Bookmarking – Social bookmarking allows for sharing found resources in an efficient means without unnecessary back-and-forth between users. Services like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Google Share Stuff are becoming part of industry research.
- Online Presentations – Two valuable resource for educational and corporate instruction are Slide Share and Google Presentations (which is part of the Google document suite.)
- Collaboration – Online collaboration is huge as it provides a means to park files and threaded discussions in one location for project development. Two free solutions are Google Documents and BaseCamp.
- Send Large Files – Bring an end to loading down the inbox with huge files. DropSend and YouSendIt are two solutions that provide a limited service for free with more robust levels for nominal fees.
- Photos – Photo sites are an option for posting photos with tighter share controls. While commonly known as a public forum, Flickr and Picasa enable sharing controls.
No one method mentioned above is appropriate for all forms of information exchange. Rather, this list presents a short list of options for segmenting the type of information exchange that is more robust and efficient than email transfer.
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8 Comments
Among the microblogging tools, have you ever tried hictu? http://www.hictu.com . It’s still a small community, but with a good potential, I guess.
Mark, Thanks for the reference. That’s a new one for me. Microblogging communities are being birthed everyday, which is really cool.
good. it helpd me
And, of course, http://corlive.com – no spam at all.
Hey, but just to point out, wikis, blogs, microblogging, forums, social communities, bookmarking, and 10-13 you talked about are all pretty much the Same Damn Thing, which is going to some guy’s website.
Check out http://office.live.com
Great for small office needs.
Mark Palmer
None of these are good for a business scenario. You need an application that can be dropped into a business and use LDAP/Active Directory if you want to use it efficiently.
Client server is still a better technology when it comes to corporate resources.
Email is indeed outdated, and for the most part sucks, but there is still no alternative that comes close to using the SMTP protocol in a client server environment.
Sorry guys,
Well Rooster I would have to disagree with you in that some of these are in fact widely used on a corporate level. Take wikis for instance. There are many companies that use them as a primary means for coordination. No doubt it’s not going away but corporate communication has broadened substantially with the use of intranets. Even the slow moving corporation where I work is embracing these technologies on a large scale.
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[...] to be wrangled-in and limited to it’s most sublime functions. As I wrote in my recent post “13 Good Alternatives to Email”, there are many great options to communication besides our over-used communication through email. [...]