Matthew Collins sent me an email recently about using Google+ Communities to share research funding opportunities and news within his department. What I find fascinating and useful to the rest of the university is that Matthew and the team in Archaeology are actively exploring other tools to do things ( like sharing tidbits of useful news ) out of email. That is to say, to say, "let's not use email anymore for this activity, let's use this new thing instead". Quite often this can have some useful effects: People get less email People are happier to contribute to the new thing because they know that their creating content won't be a burden on other peoples' email in trays The new thing has features that email doesn't that are really handy ( like being able to share all the posts with the new member of the team ). A different model of consumption happens. Because we're finding lots of people turn off Google+ notifications which generate email ...
Collaborative Tools Project