These days everybody wants to reinvent email. Word is people got bored with it and the tech entrepreneurs brains struggle on offering a sustainable social tool that could ease information traffic and keep a practical character.
While many say this is a utopia, the social business sector keeps getting accepted within organizations, even though still as an alternative.
Although e-mail has been there for us for more than 40 years, there are different actions performed by means of it that could be easily handled by a dedicated tool, meant to improve specific activities.
Let’s take mailing lists for example. We used it (and still are?) to send internal information or when we called for people’s expertise. And some used it to send those motivational and funny emails that always seemed to find their way to the recycle bin, mainly because of their “spammy” value 🙂
But its main purpose was to easier address the group of interest for your concern. And to some extend it did a good job. Only to some extent because there are important limitations to it. To list some:
- you can not browse, see topics under debate, search by facets, etc.
- people’s activity is not transparent: you can’t follow them, follow tags or subscribe to a topic if you’re not among the recipients.
- it’s not a system that encourages follow-up actions and information doesn’t get updated; it’s unpractical on a long term.
- it doesn’t reach out to new employees, so not all resources are consumed.
If all the talks and questions would be archived in an express database and you would make it searchable, updatable and accessible to all the people concerned, wouldn’t you consider mailing lists useless in terms of knowledge sharing? We did make this step and we called it Quandora.
Do you still use mailins lists? If so, what’s your experience with it? If not, what do you use as alternative?
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