Right now, #noemail is about 10 times more popular at ReeseNews.com than “Exploring female sexual pleasure”. This is a sure sign of the End Times.
In the meantime, Part Two — the Q&A segment — of the discussion about #noemail at OpenSource.com has been posted.
Open Source folks are rightly concerned that there are only a few FLOSS alternatives in the activity streams area and no good, as far as I can tell, hyperaggregators for social media done in FLOSS. I’m hoping that we’re wrong and that someone will respond with some good ideas and suggestions.
Luis Suarez and Peter Weller suggest using RSS as a way of dealing with mailing list and notifications, but I haven’t seen or come up with a good way to operationalize that yet. It seems doable though and it makes more sense than filtering email into various unread folders.
Although I’ve been aggressively unsubscribing to listserv lists, some decades old, I’m still seeing about 100+ new messages, post-spam filtering, hit my inbox every 12 hours.
From the OpenSource.com interview:
The point of the #noemail project is to engage more deeply in specialized and inter-operative tools for communications and planning and social engagement. So yes, Google apps for document sharing (like now); Dropbox or Box.com for larger files; Facebook, Diaspora, Hunch, Quora for somethings; Gtalk, AIM, Jabber, FB chat, Skype, etc. for quick communications; various approaches to location; Google calendar–as I’ve used it for several years; etc.
What I’m after is an approach that will allow my friends and co-workers and students to sort out which apps to use and to drop and how to form the usage of each. We’re in a very dynamic moment in these areas, and I expect to see a lot of new apps, a lot of changes to existing ones (big changes for Google and Facebook in the past few weeks for example), and a lot vanishing for various reasons (almost lost Delicious, or is it gone?).
Interoperability and hyper-aggregation rather than any unitary solution is more likely to be successful in the long run. I’m betting, as many are, on some sort of intelligent solutions for dealing with activity streams–some of those streams, like location a few years back, not even collected as yet–to help make sense of the world of communications and cooperation. Even if I just set up an instance of Firefox with a bunch of tabs to all of those services, I’m ahead of the jury-rigged mess that is email.
Kill email dead!