Think of it as a classification problem. Every message falls into one of four levels:
1. Should read immediately (generates an interruption)
2. Must read, but can wait (goes in a queue that I look at regularly, and must be marked read)
3. Maybe worth reading, but okay to miss (goes in a pool that I look at sometimes, but disappears if ignored. This pool should be bottomless.)
4. Should not read (uninteresting stuff, spam, and duplicates)
We have many ad-hoc systems for performing this classification, and email is only one of them; we use the medium itself as a proxy for parts of this classification.
Gmail's Priority Inbox is meant to distinguish level 1 from 2, and its spam filter to distinguish level 2 from 4, but it breaks down when level 3 messages (such as mailing lists) get into your inbox. RSS is for level 2 only, and can neither escalate to 1 nor filter to 3 and 4. Forums are for level 3 only. News aggregators like HN distinguish between levels 3 and 4, but they suck at escalating to levels 1 and 2, and their ad-hoc nature means that they have pretty serious duplication problems; an awesome post is still a level 4 message if you've already seen it.
If you want to replace email for me, you need to go broader; let me pull everything into the same system, then get the classification right.
1. Should read immediately (generates an interruption)
2. Must read, but can wait (goes in a queue that I look at regularly, and must be marked read)
3. Maybe worth reading, but okay to miss (goes in a pool that I look at sometimes, but disappears if ignored. This pool should be bottomless.)
4. Should not read (uninteresting stuff, spam, and duplicates)
We have many ad-hoc systems for performing this classification, and email is only one of them; we use the medium itself as a proxy for parts of this classification.
Gmail's Priority Inbox is meant to distinguish level 1 from 2, and its spam filter to distinguish level 2 from 4, but it breaks down when level 3 messages (such as mailing lists) get into your inbox. RSS is for level 2 only, and can neither escalate to 1 nor filter to 3 and 4. Forums are for level 3 only. News aggregators like HN distinguish between levels 3 and 4, but they suck at escalating to levels 1 and 2, and their ad-hoc nature means that they have pretty serious duplication problems; an awesome post is still a level 4 message if you've already seen it.
If you want to replace email for me, you need to go broader; let me pull everything into the same system, then get the classification right.