With my recent good experience using ManyMoon, the Superbowl advertising blitz by Chatter, and the unveiling of the well-funded Asana, we have reaching the tipping point for the use of collaboration tools.  And I think we have glimpsed the likely look and feel of the next generation of tool -- which combines the short-text sharing of social media with the tracking of projects, tasks, file-sharing, and discussions.

It is way too early to pick a winner from this crowd, and it is more likely that the tools market will remain fragmented and each of us will use different tools for each of the different projects and teams we work with.  At the same time, we can predict that the prevalent style of project communications via sharing Microsoft Office documents by email is coming to an end.  These new tools have some elements in common and help us see how project communications will work in the near future:

 

• We will share documents, links, tasks, commentary, etc. with project members via a cloud tool, rather than sending emails.  Even replies to email alerts generated by one of the cloud tools will feed into the cloud.
• All documents and links will be findable, rather than buried in the inbox of selected participants.  That will improve the sense of project history and enable people to build on prior work rather than reinvent the wheel.
• All communications will be linked to projects, teams, and tasks.  We will reach a point where we question why share anything (other than funny links) unless it is linked to a project, team, or task.
• We will become more structured in our mapping of teams to projects and tasks, rather than defining the members by who gets included in an email distribution or conference call.  
• Our email will be more of a string of links back to the cloud-based tools to inform us of important posts, updates, and deadlines.  They will no longer be stand-alone communication links to the extent they are today for many people. 
• Team members will get better at short-form communication.  They will do more Twitter-like postings of their activities and save the long-form for other types of documents.
• Calendar and task tools will become aggregators of the commitments made on various projects, combining the schedules, milestones, and deadlines from the cloud-based project tools in one place.  
• More people will learn the power of tags.  Several of these new tools enable free-form tagging and offer tag clouds.  Tags have been commonplace for most project innovators, have shown their value as an indicator of what is important, and will go more mainstream.

What are your experiences with these new communications tools?  Are they a glimpse of the future or a dead end?  What will change in how we all work and communicate as a result of them?