Email integrated with Social Software

James Dellow has a nice post researching the history of email and why email is so successful. More importantly he wonders what this means for social tools and their success. He concludes his post with the following:
Enterprise social software can also learn some important lessons from email:
  • We need interoperability between enterprise social systems.
  • Users prefer standardised interfaces.
  • It needs to be cost effective to own and operate.
Far from being a nemesis, email and enterprise social software are more likely to form a strong symbiotic relationship.
I've been thinkings and blogging about this topic quite a bit as well. I did research and product concept development on document management tools in the past. One of the things we said back then is: integrate document management into email. I think this principle still applies. I also think the killer social tools will be deeply integrated into/with email. For that reason I think Google+ has a good chance of winning the social game. People want one spot to do a lot of different things. They live in their inbox. To me the holy grail is to have a platform from which you can easily share content to email, to social nets, etc. Don't worry this will lead to less email, not more.

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