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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Still, this is a very new feature for Google, so they have some kinks to work out namely:

1. The configuration for the "intranet" home page is a little clunky. It’s not as smooth as the customizable tweaks in Blogger. I was able to tweak the header a bit to reduce the screen space but what a bummer for folks who don’t want to mess w/ HTML tags.
2. The website hosting capability they do offer does not yet integrate with Blogger which is kind of a drag. Sure I could use their clunky WYSIWYG tool and probably find a way to integrate an RSS feed but if I’m going to do much development on a new site, I think I’ll use something like WordPress on my hosted account with 1and1.com. (Which by the way I really do like as a host service). You can upload your own HTML files but who wants to mess w/ a static site, major retro move.

Okay, so it’s not perfect, but for small organizations, churches, clubs, groups etc. it provides a lot of functionality for the right price. It would certainly be possible for an organization to host all of their online needs on Google Apps, but you’d have to do some monkeying around w/ feed your blogger feeds back into the site. My recommendation at this point is to host a site with database capability and manage the rest of your services through Google Apps. That is until Google offers integrates Blogger well and/or ads db functionality, which they will do in time, just watch ‘em.