#noemail has an international Facebook predecessor. We Quit Email has a lot of members and posters from .NL out of 175 members (or more properly Likers). There folks seem to be good spirits and like me interested in things that are faster and more social. They use the hastag #wqm
Founder Kim Spinder sounds a lot like me in this article:
Why #WQM?
First of all, e-mail takes a lot of time and effort and delivers a lot of frustration, everyday! Second: we want to change and innovate the world. E-mail and paper does not change the world and does not move people. Third: It’s not the best tool for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Louis [sic Luis Suarez actually – PJ] says: “It’s a storage where everything goes, even your knowledge.”
My UNC School of Information and Library Science colleague, Jeff Pomerantz, inspects his own communications habits in light of #noemail on his PomeRantz blog in an article simply titled “email Stats”.
Just down the hall, colleague Rob Capra points to two studies of email use (from his strong background in Personal Information Management):
Voida and Mynatt “It feels better than filing: everyday work experiences in an activity-based computing system”
and
Farnham & Churchill “Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online” in which he sees data that says that under 25s use email and Facebook for about the same amount of time daily. I have not yet read this paper, but I note in passing that the research was done by Yahoo! scientists.
In the meantime, Peter Honeyman of Michigan says that he is a fan of #noemail even if it means abandoning his profession then points to his important work “Parsing ambiguous addresses for electronic services”
Honeyman (in public conversation on Facebook) says in part regarding email:
now i find the situation so hopeless that i abjure my erstwhile discipline† and declare my allegiance to the #noemail hashtag (which is trending, dontchaknow).
† http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.4380170106/abstract and http://www.uucp.org/papers/pathalias.pdf
Old BITNET pal (also in Michigan) Ed Vielmetti writes (here on this blog) and at ReeseNews “Email was great back in the day, but there really has to be something better to replace it for some subset of the tasks it is shoehorned into taking on.” As Ed goes off email for the weekend, he provides a nice list of notable email-quitter/hater articles on his blog.
Other references and discussions can be found in the ReeseNews.org and OpenSource.com articles mentioned in earlier #noemail entries at this blog.
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