I like your point about RSS is an enabler of distribution, whereas email can control distribution…basically the pull (RSS) vs push (email) model.

Like you say email could be mostly used for notifications, or an RSS Reader.

At my work I’m a member of numerous communities, and it’s great that all announcements (blog/comments), discussion (forum/replies), collaboration (wiki/comments) are done in the open archive…rather than using email.

I basically get lots of notifications and I can also action them via email without having to visit the communities.
I could get these notifications in an RSS Reader, but just the same I’d like to action them within the RSS Reader.

Fuser is a consumer product that plans to be a universal inbox and send box.

Like Luis the only type of email I hope to get is one-to-one discussion, this only happens because we yet don’t have private messaging in each of our communities.

In the future I see myself having a private inbox for each community, with my email inbox being the notifier (well it actually delivers the content and I can action back).

The good thing here is that all my private messages about KM would live in the KM CoP, all my private messages about DMS would live in the DMS CoP, and so on.

This would be ideal, rather than like now, where all my private messages about any CoP are only in my email inbox. I’d rather the messages be kept in context.
If I want to check back on some KM private messages, I don’t want to hack through my email inbox, where they are mixed up with emails from all different topics. I’d rather just go to my KM CoP to find them.
Or I could search all my CoP inboxes from a dashboard.

I also like the idea of the public comment wall. If I want to send a friend a link, I’d send it to their wall (perhaps others may like to see this as well…they’d see it in their newsfeed as well).

Let’s not forget the 3rd alternative to email and an RSS Reader is a watchlist newsfeed type page.

With email you control the distribution. With RSS you just enable distribution.

Great point in trying to avoid emails being a CMS.

It seems you don’t mind email being your notifier dashboard, another choice is an RSS Reader.

I mention a few other notifier streams in an earlier post

- On to others
- On to me
- Me to others

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/04/10/email-is-not-the-centre-of-my-universe/

I would be happy to get hundreds of email each day, notifying me of new information. I do not want to have to store the emails because the important information lives solely in the email.