Controlling Communication with Private Workspaces

Email may be the dominant collaborative application, but it's not the only one, nor even the best one for certain tasks. Panelists will discuss the use of shared workspaces such as wikis as supplements and alternatives to traditional email tools.

• MODERATOR: Jeff Ubois, Analyst, Ferris Research
• PANELIST: Ross Mayfield, CEO, Founder, Socialtext
• Tom Gruber, formerly of Intraspect (acquired by Vignette)
• Xythos

Xythos - contextual data management, with unstructure file management and sharing

Tom Gruber

What's email: an application? Content? Delivery service? It's not important how the message gets there.

Email vs. workspaces is a false dichotomy, they help each other.

• A place for email as content
• A mediator for communication
• Email as a user interface

Email is point to point, inherent scalability problems

• Undershooting -- you left me out of the loop!
• Overshooting -- occupational spam

Mediated email (threaded discussion)