"The death of email"

Last week I suggested that social networks were replacing email (see here) - a proposition not everyone agreed with (see here).  Now Slate's Chad Lorenz pronounces (with some sense of loss) the death of email:

Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change everything—nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail.

Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

How have we reached this point?

...

But transitioning beyond e-mail doesn't have to be as painful as transitioning to it. While its popularity may wane, it's hard to see e-mail vanishing completely—we'll always need some way to send each other long-form messages. Besides, we're already seeing technology that makes it simpler for everyone to communicate across all of these various channels. Gmail elegantly melds IM and e-mail, making it easy to chat with your contacts and file away instant-message conversations alongside your mail. You can now send and receive every kind of message—texts, IMs, e-mails, and Facebook posts—with most new mobile phones. It's not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you'll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post—or sending all of them at once—and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived. Once that happens, nostalgic e-mailers like me won't have to feel like dinosaurs.

Read more here.

Comments

[Furqan Durvesh]

Well, I am impressed about your article and now I am going unleash the fast regarding your follwing statement

"It's not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you'll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post—or sending all of them at once—and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived."

30th September 2009 Google launched it GOOGLE WAVE which reflect as exactly as you said on NOVEMBER 2007. So TECHNOLOGY is beyond what we think and it making our life easier than before.