Wiki + RSS + Email ecosystem

David Berlind, in recent ZDNet blog - RSS: The new intranet protocol? comments:

"With RSS as both the notification mechanism and the content subscription mechanism, you basically have a single technology that takes e-mail, e-mail attachments, and far too many round-trips (of email, to fully facilitate the collaboration) completely out of the equation. "

In essence, his main contention is that it is mainly email vendors (IBM, Microsoft etc.) who have kept the collaboration problem "alive" and not really providing better systems upfront in lieu of email technology. And now, they ought to take technologies like RSS and Wiki systems seriously and provide solutions that may replace email.

I have held to an opinion that Blogs are NOT a replacement for email. But here is a different take: RSS feed as notification of changing content in wiki, as opposed to carrying content. Is this feasible? Are people already using RSS this way? I am not sure. You normally "live" in email system, and go to read blogs in your RSS client once in a while only i.e. you will miss notifications due to faster pace of collaboration. Indeed many people wish to get emails of changes in wiki systems rather than use RSS for notifications.

So what is possibility that RSS clients take over outlook, and you start living more in RSS client? Not so soon, I would say.

There is standard "good-enough" notification mechanism: Those balloons which pop-up and disappear automatically in non-intrusive manner. Microsoft supports them in most of its products. Even thunderbird has them. May be someone has RSS-to-notifier tool out there. The only problem I find with them is their transient nature: If you are not in your seat, you are likely to miss it. But this can be augmented easily; all we want is a mechanism to show missed alerts/notifications when we return to seat.

So with multiple means of notification (i.e. emails, RSS and the pop-ups), I am not sure which are right means. All we know is that they should get our attention quickly. They also should integrate with other tools - such as postponing a task, creating an event and so on. Ideally, I would like a completely independent notification system that integrates with mobile phones, email systems and so on; it adjusts the visibility appropriately; understands expiry aspects of notifications well, and keeps tab on long as well as short term notifications. Perhaps some innovation is supposed to happen there. Yes, RSS and notifications are intricately connected; but pure RSS is not a solution for notifications-related issues I listed here.

Coming back to wiki vs. email vs. RSS problem, I believe that wikis will integrate with email in better manner. We once tried a project where email content (of a shared imap folder) was itself available as wiki, and changed content was simply posted as new email. That way, you have same content as both wiki and email; solving a major integration problem. But the project was not fully explored.

Another approach is to "webify" email i.e. have a set of tools/technologies that will transform email consumption approach to use browser (as opposed to outlook etc.). That means, every email should be a web resource. And that will enable us to create shared areas easily (to share the emails, its documents etc.), and more importantly, start shifting to wiki based collaboration in incremental and integrated manner. So over the time, everyone will find it easier to simply use wiki approach to write documents and create presentations rather than using Microsoft products for the same. (It also lessens the IT support required to support single web stack in the organization.) Zimbra pioneered this type of enterprise stack already though it is still emai-only.

One most important aspect that still matters: Emails should be available offline - on laptops, and "with you always". This is conceptually as well as technologically strong argument (i.e. less dependencies; you always have access to your email even when internet connection doesn't work etc.). But when we also want web technology to creep in somehow instead of FAT outlook. The only architecture is to have offline web server, and synchronization mechanism that treats all content uniformly. Some companies (webaroo comes to mind) are already pushing this platform (For saved search results and ready-to-use web-packs).

And of course, we know Google now has capability to offer enterprise email systems - although no offline means as yet. We can guess they have a plan.

So there is indeed a lot of excitement in this space, and email ecosystem is still most happening place for innovation.