1. 

• Why are conversation and collaboration tools so underused? Is my list of 7 reasons missing anything? Are any of the reasons predominant?
• Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?
• Given time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools, despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and collaboration, and why?
• What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?

1. Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns.
2. Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use.
3. The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they're awkward.
4. Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don't solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
5. The training materials for these tools don't match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
6. Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren't online.
7. Often we don't even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we've discovered who the right people are, we're likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.

From Dave Pollard's original blog post.Social Networking: Why are Conversation and Collaboration Tools so Underused?