> As we begin to have these exciting Squeak solutions
> why go back to other stuff?

Because wikis do not encourage the inclusion of Message Metadata. Wikis may make 
it easy to edit stuff out, but one cannot add somebody else's metadata for them. 

Because markup is not easy nor is it intuitive.

I like wikis, but they + e-mail are not evolving with the rest of the 
collaboration / groupware / peer2peer / Groove Workplace / content management / 
project management trends.
___

Check out Jon Udell's recent blog about "Mining Message Metadata":

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/11/10.html 

"The [message] bodies eventually land in an operational data store, the headers 
often don't. Yet the headers define the context of the message: who (or what) is 
sending it and why. ..."

 [Full story at http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/07/44OPstrategic_1.html]

More from Jon's blog:
"Of course, the trend even within Microsoft Office is away from micromanaging 
storage by "dragging and dropping." Witness the search folders in Outlook 2003, 
which are intended to create virtual views along multiple dimensions so you 
don't have to manually build containment structures. The Outlook 2003 product 
manager, in fact, told me that he managed the whole product cycle in an 
undifferentiated inbox, creating no folders and moving no messages.

"My hunch is that as desktop software interacts more often with well-defined 
services, the context implicit in those interactions will tend to become more 
available, and will be easier to make explicit. The key is that the context must 
arise from normal use of software. And as "normal use" comes to mean 
"participating in a Web of services," it can." 

I suspect this means applications will eventually use automated logging of 
user-application or HCI performance for statistical analysis so the application 
can adapt itself to specific users and their habits, thus making the acquiring 
of useful metadata even easier. All this since teams, commitments, and 
requirements are such fluid things that no one wants to keep editing the digital 
representations of such groups of people. You're a member of a group and acquire 
roles and identity by the history of what you do, rather than applying a label 
or being listed in a list.