There was an interesting post on SIGIA-L from Cary Evans (a Masters student at my alma mater) that lead me to the IBM Remail Project. It is a very interesting looking mail client that has some great productivity features (check out the Sources, Calendar, and MessageMap, I wish that Mail or Thunderbird had these today).
This reminded me of the seminal work that Sara Kiesler and Lee Sproull did about the power of email to affect behaviour.
I wonder about the power of new email/groupware clients and their ability to change our behaviour. There are a proliferation of new applications and technologies that are changing the publishing, sorting and reading of content that is/has been primarily distributed through the email channel. I have started using FeedDaemon and NetNewWire as a partial replacement for email news letters (technically most of the independent publishers are read using RSS and larger ones are reading using a combination of an email client and a web browser). The version 7.5 beta of Opera has integrated mail, web and RSS. Chandler is Mitch Kapor’s open-source Outlook killer. Haystack is an information management client developed at MIT. Richard Boardman has an outstanding list of other Personal Information Management tools and research.
I am just wondering where the personal and group intersect. Is it Google and other search tools (ht://Dig, Lucene, Verity, etc.). Or is it something entirely different (Groove, Zaplet)? How does mobility change this? How can we use physical context to help?