Thought Sparks

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Voice Communication – Skype is the best known service available. With business communication more global than ever it’s easy to see why.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Online Presentations – Two valuable resource for educational and corporate instruction are Slide Share and Google Presentations (which is part of the Google document suite.)
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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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