This is an interesting article by the Financial Times about the alternatives to the email, which has become a ‘killer application’. “We can’t live without it, but we can’t manage it properly either� explains the author before describing her 4 main challenges: spam, security, organised storage, and asynchrony.

Despite it all, email is still the most used tool in order to communicate and collaborate with others and even to do unimaginable things, like planning tasks, because it is a very flexible and, above all, informal application. And the fact that blackberries are becoming more and more popular to download emails anywhere makes this phenomenon even bigger.

Fortunately, as the Financial Times assures, new collaborative software is being created and it could act as a substitute to emails. The article mentions wikis, blogs and social networks, among others, as tools to create communities of practice among organizations. The fact that the Bible of capitalism (shall the Economist excuse us, since it belongs to the same group) is talking about these tools is, no doubt, a sign of their settlement.