I think a point that people are missing is that these new kinds of communication are better only because of their newness. I am willing to bet, Paul, that if you had 5000 friends on FaceBook that you would receive just as much garbage as you do in your email. What we really want to do is change the ratio of good/garbage messages. Moving from service to service seems to be a poor way to do that. What's more, I doubt you would be doing this if your livelihood depended on those communications. Out of that 100 emails you received in the last 12 hours, how many were really spam? How many of them were legitimate email that you just didn't want to read?
The problem with sites like this is the mining of information. Insurance companies can use sites like this to deny coverage to people that they wouldn't normally be able to find information about. Medical information is suppose to be private for a reason. However, there is no reason why a national database of health research couldn't be produced. Then doctors would be able to search for people doing research in a certain area.
I think a point that people are missing is that these new kinds of communication are better only because of their newness. I am willing to bet, Paul, that if you had 5000 friends on FaceBook that you would receive just as much garbage as you do in your email. What we really want to do is change the ratio of good/garbage messages. Moving from service to service seems to be a poor way to do that. What's more, I doubt you would be doing this if your livelihood depended on those communications. Out of that 100 emails you received in the last 12 hours, how many were really spam? How many of them were legitimate email that you just didn't want to read?