I feel like google wave tried to tackle these problems as well.
Specifically, it was possible for people to join and leave a conversation much in the same way that facebook messaging threads work now.
While Wave did subscribe fairly heavily to the traditional message and reply model it also had support for wiki-style messages, so it was possible for a summary to be maintained in the top message of each thread. (The instant replay tool I always thought was very cool, too.)
And towards the end it did start to introduce some tools to encourage people to summarise information (although admittedly nothing revolutionary). I'm mainly thinking of its widgets for event organisation, date planning and voting which are always horrible to do via email.
I think Wave had a lot of problems and, it may be, that the problems it did solve it didn't solve well but I do think it at least tried and had a few good ideas.
Specifically, it was possible for people to join and leave a conversation much in the same way that facebook messaging threads work now.
While Wave did subscribe fairly heavily to the traditional message and reply model it also had support for wiki-style messages, so it was possible for a summary to be maintained in the top message of each thread. (The instant replay tool I always thought was very cool, too.)
And towards the end it did start to introduce some tools to encourage people to summarise information (although admittedly nothing revolutionary). I'm mainly thinking of its widgets for event organisation, date planning and voting which are always horrible to do via email.
I think Wave had a lot of problems and, it may be, that the problems it did solve it didn't solve well but I do think it at least tried and had a few good ideas.