Methods for Information Distribution?

Prep asks: "We're all faced with a glut of information. Everyone where I work seems to use email as their primary means of information distribution. However, thanks in part to huge file attachments and a massive influx of spam, email delivery times are now apparently exceeding the times that our user base deems acceptable, so I've began to wonder about other means of informing users of changes to information they deem important. Ideally, the user would subscribe to various feeds (changes in their network share filesystem, various intranet webpages being updated, RSS feeds, etc) and notifications of changes to those sources would be pushed to them on an automated basis. I'm wondering if an IM based solution might not be useful here. I can't imagine this is an isolated problem, and wonder what other /.'s are doing to address it."

Comments

Agents

[ghostlibrary]

Basically, we're back to the classic idea of 'agents', things that hunt down info for you, then distill it and order it and present it to you.

Fascinating field, but darn tricky. New waves of paradigm shifts (okay, jargon changes) come and go, but the need for good agents remains.

Currently, the best agents are still, well, graduate students and secretaries.

IM is just like email...

[Telastyn]

For all purposes an IM system is an email system which has its user interface focused on users rather than on the messages themselves. Any abuse that email systems recieve, so shall IM systems.

That said, common email systems could use some improvement, just don't expect human nature to change simply because the app [sort of] did.