Email Group-forming

A must read piece by Jon Udell on the email's properties for easy group formation.

Jon suggests that email substitutes exist for some of its uses:

For broadcasts: as some of us have lately been pointing out, newsletters, mailing lists, and other automatic notifications can easily be converted to RSS feeds and can work more effectively in that mode.

For inter-personal communication: Instant messaging would take up some of the slack. But the odds of finding every intended message recipient online at the same time diminish as you multiply recipients.

For Asynchronous messaging: Web-based forums, Wikis, and Weblogs are some of the messaging hubs that can enable groups to communicate independently of time and space.

But the above tools have a drawback: What they can't support as easily or as effectively as e-mail is the dynamic formation (and dissolution) of those groups....Software that requires people to explicitly declare the formation of these groups, and to acknowledge their dissolution, is too blunt an instrument for such ephemeral social interaction.

Clay points out the need to unsubscribe from threads and the opportunity for iterative group forming:

There is a very interesting space between the low-overhead, short-livedness, and poor user control of CC line conversations vs the relatively high setup costs, long-livedness, and good user control of mailing lists, a space that might be occupied by software that easily converted CC line conversations to mailing lists that would let the users unsub, but would vanish unless the users periodically re-ratified its existence.

At Socialtext, we complement the best use of email by forking other uses to shared spaces. This can be as easy as CC to wiki.