At the moment in my team, we have lots of means of group communication: Documentum eRooms, Sharepoint, Drupal blogs, email, group meetings etc. Its true, one size doesn't fit all, and this is one of the reason we have such an arsenal of tools. The problem is, everyone in the team has their favorite tools for doing communicating. I prefer a combination of Drupal and email, but a lot of my colleagues love eRoom (which I really hate!!), and some just like to talk to face to face. This is fine and I truly believe that we should be able to choose the tools that suit us and they we think/work, however we have reached a situation where people have stopped communicating effectively because no one can agree on how we should do it.
The problem is that each of these applications publishes its data to different (often siloed) location, so whilst I might prefer to use Drupal - someone else might want to use eRoom, so everyone has to look in two separate places. Obviously RSS provides a solution to this, all people have to do is subscribe to the various communication feeds in the group and they get all the information delivered to them. This is great, but the problem is that the communications are still siloed. The key to online communication is that it becomes a conversation - currently if I want to comment on someone's post, I still to go to several places to do it.
So far the only technology that is even close to dealing with this is fav.or.it (http://fav.or.it/). They have produced an RSS reader that combines commenting with post retrieval - taking aggregation to the next level and maybe making keeping up with online communication platform independent?
