Ray Ozzie: Post-email world?

This is a fascinating article by Ray Ozzie where he talks about his first two weeks of weblogging and the post-email world.

Not, of course, that eMail is going away; of course it’s not. Email is the place where most conversations begin, and will remain forever a critical business tool – one that is being enhanced in its own fascinating directions – particularly with regard to acting as a filtering proxy that dispatches notifications to your wireless mobile devices, wherever you happen to be. But, for a variety of reasons, more and more of us will seek additional and alternative methods of connecting with one another – places that are more natural, more private, more productive, more effective – me-to-you, mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart. Places that will enable us to “have a life” offline, while simultaneously juggling a dramatic number of online connections that are meaningful and valuable to us. Places designed to yield a higher “return on connection” for each of us – strengthening the connections between us and those with whom we interact, online. Places designed to yield a higher “return on connection” through lowered transaction costs for our organizations. who need us to work online together effectively.

Ray goes on to briefly describe how he developed Groove as his first post-email tool. I now begin to understand where he’s coming from with the notion of shared spaces with notifications being more task-oriented than email.

I envision a range of spaces: from my most private (e.g., my desktop — but which I could easily replicate to another machine but wouldn’t be shared with others) to my most public (e.g., this weblog — along with other things I’d like to easily have public like photo albums, files, etc.). In between are the shared spaces I want to have with others — either individually or with groups — with many individuals being in multiple groups. Messaging, email, file sharing, tasks, notes, you name it would be focused around a space “tied” to an individual. I’ve have the ability for many different views of this “spaces world” — a “spaces explorer” — e.g., an “in-box” view which would look across the spaces I’ve subscribed to and inform me of new/changed stuff, etc.

Is Groove open? By that I mean is is possible for other developers to develop client software which “plugs-in” and interoperates with Groove clients?

Usability matter tremendously. I found Notes and now Groove to be rich in function but weak in terms of the user interface. Frankly, I’d love to see a Groove for Mac OS X (not my mainstream OS which is still Windows XP) — because I think it would force a valuable UI upgrade to a more pleasant design!