Getting around

Today our office e-mail went down. Suddenly I felt cut off from the rest of the world. With e-mails down, phone calls started coming in, mostly telling me that there are materials to review and that the e-mail was down. It's almost impossible to believe there was a time when we worked without e-mails.
What does e-mail do?
E-mails form a convenient channel to share information.
E mails provide people a means to highlight their concerns.
E-mails provide a convenient means to forward information.
Because of this, once the server came down, a lot of things stopped. What if we decentralized the information management?
We could have a central site to share information, with RSS feeds built in. Information at the site allows for larger file sizes and different file formats, unshackling us from the 5MB transmit limit and the 10MB Mailbox size. While e-mailing creates copies for each recipient, only one copy need to be maintained. and, furthermore, with RSS enabled feed, user get updates of changes.
While e-mail allows people to reach specific persons to highlight their issues, services like twitter allow departments to have a general profile which broadcasts simple information to subscribers ("followers").
the drawback of e-mail is that its not necessarily realtime. Users who send out e-mail do so with a touch of faith that someone will recieve the e-mail and respond. Instant messaging applications
lets u see if someone is available and engage them in realtime.
Finally, e-mails are just names in your contact list. Who are they? You won't know. social networking sites provide us with the ability to "humanise" our presence and share our online lives. For the customer in search of service, the value of knowing the likes and dislikes of specific individuals allow for easier communication.
With the above, we get the same service we use e-mail for, and more. Should we still depend on e-mails? What do you think?

update: At a recent knowledge cafe organized by David Gurteen, Luiz Suarez spoke as to whether we could do without e-mail. A transcript of his discussion can be found here.