Wikis and IM offer New Hope to End the Crushing Weight of Email

In 2006 there will be 22,000 billion emails messages sent, up from 19,000 billion law year, according to the April 4 Financial Times. It’s a crushing load.  I could easily spend an entire workday doing nothing but answering emails.  But there’s good news:

• The growth in spam is slowing.
• Most business have effective enough email filtering technologies.
• Companies like America Online offer a Goodmail System, which charges the sender to guarantee delivery to the mailbox of a recipient, who has agreed in advance to accept the email.
• Technologies like instant messages and wikis (web sites that anyone can edit) will draw users away from email, so fewer messages will be sent.

E-mail was never meant to be a collaboration tool, for which it now is overly used.  Blackberry-addicted executives are using email for online negotiations and scheduling, ultimately reducing efficiency and increasing stress.  Business people phone each other less and turn to the less-efficient and less personal alternative of email.

There are two ways out of the email overload, according to the FT:

1. Younger people who grew up with instant messaging are bringing its use to the workplace.  Three or four quick IMs can instantly replace email messages that get bogged down in the crush of messages or falsely snagged by spam filters.

2. Wikis (which are like a Word document online) are becoming popular for collaborating on documents, according the FT, especially for things like meeting agendas and project reports.  “Wikis help managers and executives keep in touch with projects without getting CC-ed to death,” the FT said on page 1 of its April 12 Digital Business section.

Open Text, which sells wiki software, says wikis consistently reduce email volume by about one-third, by capturing content and storing it online.  High-tech companies like Google and even conservative institutions like the Dresdner Kleinword Wassterein investment banks are using wikis.  In fact, traffic on the DKW wiki exceeds that on the entire DKW intranet.

Finally there may one day be a return to the ancient technology of “voice messaging.”  This is when you pick up a phone and actually talk to someone. Can “in person messaging” be far behind?