Digital Media Buzz > Is Email on a Downward Slope?

Is Email on a Downward Slope?

By Barbara Gengler

One of the bright spots in the software market is online collaboration systems, which many experts agree are proving to be vibrant. Forrester Research points out 37 percent of companies will either be piloting collaboration software or upgrading their existing deployments, with another 21 percent saying they are considering some type of collaboration software.

Ninety-six percent of enterprises and 95 percent of small and mid-size businesses say they will be at some stage of email adoption over the next 12 months.”The tough economy is forcing companies to restrict travel while keeping distributed teams in touch,” Forrester analyst TJ Keitt wrote in a report. “Changes in the composition of the workforce mean enterprises must find ways to capture the knowledge of retiring Baby Boomers and provide Gen Yers with their favored tools to work efficiently.”

These trends have created opportunities for collaboration vendors at both the enterprise level and among SMBs, according to Forrester. “Regardless of company size, it is apparent that email is the collaboration tool firms can’t do without,” Keitt wrote.A mere 38 years after the first email was sent, Twitter, Yammer, Mozilla Labs, Zenbe and others are challenging email.

Zenbe’s newest service, Shareflow, works synergistically with email and enables teams and businesses to collaborate in a shared communication space. Zenbe provides solutions to email overload without requiring a user to change his or he email address. The company provides applications from a Web browser and is securely hosted in the cloud.Google is part of the new trend as well. Officially in beta, Google Wave, is a full-featured collaboration and communication tool that combines email, instant messaging, wikis Web chat, social networking and project management.

Google Wave lets users work on the same content object, called a wave. A wave is a conversation with multiple participants, who are added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. ”Email and instant messaging were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats,” Lars Rasumsen, software engineering manager and co-creator of Google Wave, wrote on his blog. “Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented - blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. - and now all these advances are presumed as a starting point.”

The product, available as a developer preview, is an HTML 5 application built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a text editor and other functions such as desktop drag-and-drop. It can also be considered a platform, with a set of APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other Web services and build new extensions that work inside waves.Another innovation from the new generation of innovators comes from the leader in enterprise micro-blogging.

Yammer boasts it is revolutionizing the way companies collaborate, communicate and share content. Its tool makes companies and organizations more productive and already integrates with Outlook 2007 and Windows Mobile. Phil Spitzer, marketing associate at Yammer, says the company makes communication much easier than email. “If you compare it side by side when you are delivering or sending a message in Yammer, you can choose your recipients or recipients can subscribe to whoever they want to,” he says. “Whereas with email you just email to a list or blank list and don’t know who is on that list, so it is less clear who I am emailing.”

Yammer has more than 50,000 businesses using its products in just over a year and said 2010 is going to be about selling and driving revenue. ”Do I think email will die completely? I think it is on a downward slope, it’s on its way out,” Spitzer says.

Mozilla Labs recently introduced a messaging innovation that creates useful messaging experiences. Mozilla Labs posted details of its project, called Raindrop, which is a Web service created to collate, filter and present content from disparate messaging services. It currently comes with support for Twitter, GMail, IMAP email and Skype.Email used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the Internet, the posting states, but that’s no longer the case today.

“In today’s world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, email, etc. to communicate,” Mozilla Labs reports. “As a result we never know that we’ve actually processed all the important messages, because our email has been overwhelmed by noise, which obscures the real messages from real people.”

Mozilla chair Mitchell Baker wrote on her blog that most of us receive messages from many online sources — email, instant messages, tweets Facebook messages and links.”Raindrop is a new kind of message manger, capable of sifting and sorting messages in many ways,” she wrote. “From its open source core to the very problem it tries to solve, frustration over email glut, it will be important to many users.”

Google Wave, Yammer and Raindrop have the potential to change the way users communicate online. And while the downfall of email has been predicted for years, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Barbara Gengler more than a decade experience covering the Silicon Valley hi-tech market before moving to the East Coast. She previously worked for trade publications and for print and online magazines.