Why Email Isn't Dead

Hmm, I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, but this is a pretty lame article. It's more like a thinly veiled advertisement disguised as a thought-provoking content piece:

"People say email is dead. No, it's not! In fact, we've got this awesome email newsletter that's just for startup founders, and it's doing super awesome. Long live email!"

Gee that's...convenient.

Obviously email is not dead. But what about email newsletters? People actually still read these?

Apparently they do, since StartupDigest seems to have a successful model built around this, as do a few others. Why/how is it successful? Is the format truly superior to a blog? Is there a reason why email newsletter ONLY is superior to blog + email newsletter (+ RSS + Twitter + Facebook + etc.)?

These are questions which I'd have been interested in hearing the author's perspective on, but this article is nothing more than a bit of hype in response to another bit of hype.

I've always thought these "email is dead or shortly will be" articles to be wildly presumptuous. The argument is generally that the tween/teen demographic hardly ever uses e-mail, and instead use facetwitsquarespace, hence as they grow up email will die out.

This argument is missing one huge point: what happens when these people go to work? How many businesses will want internal communications delivered over social networks?

Email, although far from perfect, is a wonderful work tool. It's private, it's asynchronous, it's distributed, it's cheap. I don't see this being replaced by social messaging.

I'm not sure who the "many" people the author refers to who think Twitter will replace email, but they are certainly being hyperbolic.

I imagine what they really mean to say is that some sort of social identity will replace email as our manifestation of self online. That is to say, we used to default to email as the way we ran our Communications (big "C") as individuals.

"How can I find you online?" Oh, here's my email address.

But are people still identifying themselves that way?

8.3% of online time is spent with email (-28% shrink from last year). 22.7% of online time is spent social networking (+43% growth from last year). [Source: The Nielson Company, June 2010 data]

As we grow to use social accounts - Facebook, Google, Twitter - to sign up for stuff and spend most of our time there, the question is: will there be a psychological shift so that I am not uniquely identified by my email address, but rather by a richer and more controllable social profile?

"How can I find you online?" Oh, look me up on Facebook.

Already, I default to connecting with Not-Quite-Friends by telling them to find me online at my social profiles.

Once I give out my email address, I can never take it back, and everyone gets the same priority ("unread") whether you are my mother or a salesman.

I don't think anyone rationally disputes that email will always - or at least for a very long time - be something we use as a central way to communicate with people we have close relationships with; family, co-workers, anyone we have high frequency contact with.

But the author is - I assume because it's written on StartupDigest - trying to grasp the implications on how startups use these communication channels to reach & engage with customers.

In that respect: watch out, email may very well be dying.

Yes, email isn't dead, neither is ice cream, shoes, reading, haircuts, breathing, christmas, weather, cups, the alphabet, kleenex, video games, sunglasses, intercourse, barrels, pigeons, onramps, krazy glue, pennies, and so forth....

how about a more important question, maybe one with a less obvious answer, like: is hacker news dead?

This is tangential, but I drive two of my favourite web apps almost entirely through email (Tripit and Highrise) and a third (Instapaper) quite a bit. I basically live in Instapaper and Highrise, so that's saying something.

I have email literally everywhere and email reminders are still easily the most effective notification system for a bunch of things I've seen.

I'm still waiting for the foretold deaths of print, vinyl LPs, and CDs. Somehow, I believe print will manage to outlive all of these.

Anyone else notice all the fields on the comment form are prepopulated on that page with a guy called "Brian Armstrong"? I didn't put them there and this isn't a shared browser.. WordPress vulnerability?