The guys at "Central Desktop" have a great post on their blog about email and it's unwillingness to die as the collaboration tool of choice for most mainstream users.

The post (rightly) suggests, we still live in our inbox and any collaboration software that hopes to truly integrate into our workflow must start there. As they point out, email has the client-side immediacy of alerts and self-determined relevance that other applications don't offer.

Perhaps Touchstone might go some way to help free us from the inbox and give web-based software the power to reach the user outside of the mailbox.

Or perhaps Touchstone might help un-clutter the inbox by routing mail through its relevancy engine first.

I particularly like the last paragraph:

Am I suggesting that we all abandon our collaboration dreams and submit to email? Absolutely not. As a fellow collaboration software vendor, though, I think we've got our work cut out ahead of us. Mass adoption isn't around the corner. In order for any of us to succeed beyond the outer rings of the blogosphere, we must look closely at the single most successful medium to enter the business world in 25 years. We must take a closer look at this killer app and apply the same rules of simplicity and ease-of-use to our own products if we ever expect to become more than a cottage industry. To succeed, we must look back and learn and apply what we've come to understand as the Good In Email.