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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Paul Jones is Strategic Consultant in Informatics at Intrahealth International as well as the director of ibiblio.org (the site formerly known as MetaLab and SunSITE UNC). In addition to speaking and writing engagements all over the world and the internet, Paul teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Media and Journalism.
Authored Comments
I understand this and it's used commonly enough to have a name "email bankruptcy". In fact that name inspired me to use a different but similar name for my own effort -- "divestment".
I'm not interested in dropping email but in moving my time and attention investments to places where the reward is greater. I will reinvest in new and emerging communications options regularly and divest in those that don't give strong returns. I've done this all along with things that looked promising like Plurk or Orcut or Friendster or (sadly) indenti.ca and I'm on the fence with Hunch and Quora at the moment.
I wish I were better about managing my listserv investments, but I guess now I'll get that way as I look for RSS and archives access to replace the mailing lists parts.
I see Facebook as only one part of the puzzle. Naturally the folks at Facebook see themselves as the total answer, but I don't buy that.
I think that Buzz, Mugshot, FriendFeed and others are steps toward a smarter and better solution, but so far not the one that has had the right traction, timing and adaptation.
What I would love, as indicated above and on my blogs in discussion with Michael Tiemann, is a open source solution that is aware of social, location, etc and can and does aggregate as applications rise and fall in importance to me and the folks who want to communicate with me.