I'd really like to see more things built on top of email instead of using their own separate protocols (falling back graciously to email when possible).

Anyway, at this point it looks inevitable that I'll end up using 50 different apps/tools to do basically the same thing because everyone I talk to will use a different one...

I always thought SMTP would have been an interesting approach for sending out the equivalent of Web Hooks. Just email out XML or JSON, let it sit in email accounts and use POP/IMAP libraries to read.

It some ways it is superior to how web hooks are normally implemented. E.g. Most SMTP relays have queues for both inbound and outbound delivery. Plus there are semantics for failed or bounced delivery.

what sort of stuff would you like to see built on top of email? that could be very interesting

Hipchat is good at falling back to email only if you're not online; I'd like to see more similar services do the same thing. At the moment when something happens on facebook I get two notifications within a couple of seconds - one from the facebook app, then one from gmail.

If anyone is interested, I am working on a startup in this area (email+webooks). I'd love to see more thoughts on how email (both content of, and infrastructure around) can be extended and improved.

Why am I the only person it seems that loves email? It's like business texting. You can do it asynchronously and it's ubiquitous. Sure it has its negatives and it doesn't replace Skype/GChat or face-to-face, and we can use other apps that are better for certain cases, but I can't imagine myself taking a hard no email stance.

I love it. It is far more important to me than Facebook/Jabber/&c., all of which are problematic for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it's my age, but I've been emailing for ~25 years now, and it's unlikely that new channels will displace email for me.

I'm with you. Email works. Email replacements are a doomed fashion and those migrating to them exclusively are deluded.

> Yammer has nested conversations, search, inline images and likes. It is also our company directory. And they have a mobile app.

Minus the likes, that's email.

To clarify, the author is listing features that differentiate Yammer from twitter, which it started out as being most similar to (but a private, company / organization internal usage version of).

Unlike email, Yammer or other twitter-like platforms are ambient, one-to-many without demanding each person's attention, and length-limited. It's easy to put a message out without being interruptive, and get attention to it / responses from whoever's available. I find it pretty valuable.

Yeah, and just like Eric Schmidt said, Twitter is just a poor man's email. http://www.dvice.com/archives/2009/03/google-sounds-s.php

Boy, was he right. Not out of touch in the least.

i reckon this is clearly intended for non-technical business/sales people. from an software/systems engineering perspective i feel that one of the primary benefits of email is its async behaviour.

unlike IRC/IM/video/telephone/face-to-face interactions, which happen in realtime, email provides an opportunity for reflecting on conversations and responses, while also allowing people in diverse geographic areas to take part in the natural flow of a conversation.

couple this with the fact that pretty much anyone can run a mail server and communicate with any other person on the internet - i am not sure how abandoning email communication for closed systems like yammer/facebook for near-time communication would be a net positive.

having said that - adding these tools to your suite of communication formats is clearly a good thing.

Found it odd that you call 'Pivotal Tracker' just 'Tracker'.I recognized the mobile app screenshot, but didn't understand what the 'Tracker' app was until I clicked the link. :-)

I think the pivots usually call it "tracker."

Same here, at first I thought it was a new app. We use it too, and usually call it Pivotal, for short.

Why is this a good thing? Not being snarky, just seems i am missing something. Whats the big win about 'no email'? seems like they use plenty of electronic communication.

We looked into switching to HipChat, but we're sticking with Skype. We really liked HipChat's interface and API, but there were a few negatives.

1) HipChat doesn't support audio only calls and conference calls. This was a dealbreaker for us. 2) Skype has a much larger user base overall and we can use it with other non-company members. 3) One of our developers wrote a plugin to inline images into Skype, which is a nice feature of HipChat. 4) Skype is free. 5) Skype's messaging is P2P and works in our office when our internet goes down. (Thanks Time Warner)

FWIW, we use Google Hangouts for conference calls.

That's great guys.

You still email me almost every day, though.

Which emails are those? Besides our weekly digest I only see two emails sent from startups interested in you.

I can identify with having too many places to check to see what's going on - we ended up building something to solve the problem. We wanted to bring info from source control, support tickets, servers/monitoring/PaaS, continuous integration and a bunch of other things into one place so we could see what's going on (and also we wanted a really simple red/orange/green status view of everything in the context of the apps we are writing and deploying).

We put out a Beta version recently and are keen for people to have a look and provide feedback - check it out at appsecute.com

We're thinking we should also be outputting info to tools like HipChat, IRC and maybe even Skype, for those who are already heavily invested in a chat system. Again we're keen to see what people think...

The Lindy Effect is on the side of e-mail.

What you y'all use for lightweight project/task management? Genomera investor Nat Turner recommends Asana <http://www.natsturner.com/post/40173294607>. Surely you guys tried Asana. How was the fit?

Interesting post - but I'm not sure that it is any better. What I see is 3 or 4 place I now have to check to figure out what is going on. What I like about email is one place to communicate and search.

You can do all that with only one application. It is an all-in-one app, email centric app for business. Matches exactly AngelList requirements Check mailquatro.com

Relieved to see this was about internal communication. Email marketing and announcements are still highly effective and ubiquitous amongst users.

can't I do most if not all of this through various Google services without having to branch out between multiple tools&apps?