If they manage to succeed, they would surely be changing the game of how we interact online; they would prove it’s possible to live without corporate email, even for audits, tracking records, KM related tasks, etc. etc. And if that is the case it will mark the beginning of plenty of others joining in as well.

I plan to continue carrying out this particular initiative, as it has helped me achieved plenty of the stuff I know I wouldn’t have had otherwise without it. And looking into the near future with offerings such as Project Vulcan where email goes back to being a messaging and notification system I have high hopes that very very soon we will have something emerging that would be much better. Time will tell …

Your welcome and your efforts associated with A World Without Email are certainly noble and I’ve followed the progress. Indeed, it is possible to reshape communications processes to squelch (or quell more accurately) the absurd flow of email. However, as your experiment has shown, success doesn’t come easily. While shifting the bulk of communications to social systems may be a good approach for some, it’s probably not ideal for everyone. And with the fluidity of social networks and very low switching costs, one must ask – how sustainable is any strategy that places key communications archives out into the wild? And further, the fragmentation of communications content makes it all the more difficult to wrangle into one location for historical perspective, legal requirements, or knowledge management needs.

I get it though – you are trying to blaze a new trail and that’s good – actually great! Your experiment has already demonstrated many options and some very useful solutions to the tsunami of messages and the debilitating and high-friction atmosphere we casually adopt known as “email”. And there are some very good initiatives that have tried to make a dent in this problem – Gist is one example, but it’s now a RIM product so we can’t really depend on it as a pervasive idea or technology.

For now, I’m staying with my assertion in this article (which was penned more than three years ago BTW) – nothing has emerged that’s better. ;-)

With regards to one of your comments above RE: “(i) no one has come up with a better approach that has challenged or displaced email” allow me to challenge that one for a bit and share with your audience over here an initiative I have been running over the course of the last three years called “Living A World Without Email” (#lawwe), where during the course of that period I have managed to move over 95% of all of the email conversations I used to have into social software spaces.

To the point where there are only two different use cases / scenarios that still make me go back to email every now and then: 1) Calendaring and Scheduling (For meetings and conference calls) and 2) 1:1 confidential / sensitive conversations that should remain private (HR, Legal, IP Law kind of discussions). For the rest, it’s all out of my Inbox and into social spaces.

It’s been quite an experiment folks can follow over at A World Without Email, where I share some progress reports over the course of weeks. Latest one is a near wrap of last year where all in all I averaged 17 emails received per week, which is 2.4 emails received per day. I haven’t killed email just yet, but I think I have certainly managed to challenge it and displace it showing it’s no longer the King of Communication / Collaboration, but just one more option, and in most cases, perhaps not the better one… :)