great points, it's more figurative, i just needed a catchy title ;)
i think social app communication features are much more usable than email, there's also a linkage between users in social apps that can be leveraged to provide even higher levels of usability: CRM integration with contact management, calendar, customer support, etc.
imagine that your company got rid of email altogether and used something like a facebook app for all communications.
i view facebook and social apps as a communication tool with multiple dimensions as compared to email, a social app being a superset of email. so why carry forward email, other than that it's a legacy standard being used by a lot of users at the moment.
imagine business cards of the future:
Name
Social App ID
there would obviously be some time before this would effectively take hold of the greater amounts of users, but i think that time is soon.
if facebook added an administrative interface and made it multi-tenented, the pitch could be to throw out your exchange server over time. i'm not sure what the worth to their strategy would be in the future to take on enterprise users, but i imagine it's quite valuable.
i answered in another thread so didn't feel like repeating; but basically you'd need a phased approach to get off email, it wouldn't happen overnight. from day one at company x, you'd get an email address and social id, you'd have both mechanisms for communication. over time the benefits of a social app would most likely outweigh the benefits of email and a natural progression would occur, i.e. lots of companies will start to adopt it.
i use email now only because it's a legacy standard though this is definitely decreasing in favor of social apps. this is analogous to television and internet.
my prediction is that a social app will take over email as the primary internet communication method and you will start to see this manifest itself very soon, even inside of corporations.
i think social app communication features are much more usable than email, there's also a linkage between users in social apps that can be leveraged to provide even higher levels of usability: CRM integration with contact management, calendar, customer support, etc.
imagine that your company got rid of email altogether and used something like a facebook app for all communications.
i view facebook and social apps as a communication tool with multiple dimensions as compared to email, a social app being a superset of email. so why carry forward email, other than that it's a legacy standard being used by a lot of users at the moment.
imagine business cards of the future:
Name
Social App ID
there would obviously be some time before this would effectively take hold of the greater amounts of users, but i think that time is soon.
if facebook added an administrative interface and made it multi-tenented, the pitch could be to throw out your exchange server over time. i'm not sure what the worth to their strategy would be in the future to take on enterprise users, but i imagine it's quite valuable.