Turning Email Up-side Down

Just read this post by a Google employee about how Gmail helps managing workflows. I have been thinking about this a lot recently because my emails have become pretty much unmanageable. There are so many threads (some interdependent) in various stages, it's just impossible to track them all. The problem is email is a generic means of communication. 90% of all interactions that need even a little human intervention have to go through email. We need to turn this up-side down. Instead of having to use email as the central place where almost all communication happens, make it a secondary place (it's actually what I would call a bottom-up view of our communications). The primary place should be various different applications (the top-down view). Certainly we need a place to view all threads sorted into different tabs based on their type (e.g., emails, service requests, meeting proposals, discussions, etc.).

Email, having been the killer app of the Internet for the longest time, still has a lot of room for innovations.