Woohoo! First comment in your new "comment system!" :D

I agree, and had been thinking of publishing a similar post.

"I know I've left numerous emails grow stale because there were simply too many different things in the email that required a response, and I didn't want to send a response without responding to everything in the email because then I would inevitably receive yet another email response without being able to file the original as being processed and thus have the situation worsen!"

This rang so true to me.

What do Twitter, et. al. need to do in order to completely replace email? That was what I was thinking about for my blog post.

I remember when email worked for me, but it's been broken for years - I have unread emails sitting in my gmail inbox from over a year ago, waiting for a reply that will never come.

Efail is here, and has been for some time.

Mailing lists could be replaced with something like Pibb <https://pibb.com/>

Completely agree. I wish more of my colleges would concur as well. Reducing your email is extremely difficult to do.

Very interesting. One wonders how much the problem of scale really affects certain users versus internet superstars (here's looking at you, tantek).

Going back and re-reading the original hypotheses (which were very insightful, and something I won't want to forget), I can see how email is not just a problem for "superstars" – it inherently requires a high cognitive load, as well as suffring problems like requiring whole answers and not scaling. Got it. Good stuff.

Couldn't agree more with your sentiments. Internally at our company, some folks abuse email threads and include voluminous CC lists so everyone's in the proverbial loop. It causes so much inbox bloat and the truly important messages can get lost in the shuffle. Even with useful tools like flagging and grouping threads, I still find myself letting messages grow stale. Even more telling is when I follow up an email with a live conversation only to find people asking me questions that were addressed in the email! Just goes to show you how many people actually read these days.

Wiki+IRC FTW!

I wholeheartedly agree that email is an inefficient way to communicate today, given the alternatives.

A while back I wrote about IRC and why it is *still* a great solution to communicate in real-time: http://www.csarven.ca/irc...

yep

Email is not broken; Its users are. Email was designed to be used as a business memo, though no one in his right mind would use the standard business memo as he (probably) does email. One of the best things to do, I think, would be to remove the "reply" function, from either programs or people.