call me old fashioned

So it seems like everyone -- er, everyone in San Francisco -- okay, everyone in San Francisco tech circles -- ah, okay, fine, just a handful of very smart people -- is talking about Web 2.0 technologies these days. And while I do think the tools in this category have the potential to be used to accomplish a lot of great things, I'm a little frightened at what seems like an overbearing willingness to overlook the need to gradually integrate the new tools with the old, tried-and-true ones that we're all comfortable with.

Case in point: I recently said "aw, what the heck" and set up a wiki so that a group of friends could collaboratively plan a camping trip we're taking soon. While the wiki -- basically a shared whiteboard -- worked suprisingly well in that it reduced the number of emails and phone calls that we all had to send back and forth to plan the trip, I found it a bit of a pain to have to remember to check the wiki every evening to find out whether anyone had added anything new to the page.

So, I figured I'd just subscribe to the wiki and automatically get emailed each time someone updates the page. Not so easy. Wikispaces, the wiki provider that we're using, only lets you get notified of updates via an RSS feed -- another Web 2.0 technology.

The thing is: I don't always keep my RSS feed reader open and running. Plus, I like to check my email from multiple computers and multiple programs depending on where I am. So why can't I just get a simple email notification? What up, Wikispaces? Is email too old-fashioned to be cool?