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Comment by slyn | Hacker News Reader

1: My daughter just moved into her own house today. 2: Wow, awesome! I should call them to congratulate her! Whats the new house number? 1: Oh, she doesn't have a landline, she just uses her cell phone. 2: That's the scariest thing I've heard so far today. 1: ???...

To the newest generations email is an antiquated technology that has no real use among their peers. Eventually they might get some email address for college/professional use, but that's practically akin to a fresh college grad now getting a fax machine because "its what we use at the office".

Not shocking.

Edit: Unless by "the scariest thing" you mean the idea of xyz@facebook.com becoming the default for the >17 crowd, in which case, disregard my nonsense.

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I think your comparisons are completely wrong. Is there anything you could do with land lines that you cannot do with mobile phones? No, but there are lots of things email does that Facebook does not do (and vice versa).

Send/receive faxes to/from a dedicated fax amchine, use an analog modem or coupler, connect multiple extensions to the same line, connect an Asterisk box, play DTMF tones into the receiver and have it dial, pulse dial by toggling the 'hang-up' switch...

That's all I can thing of right now.

>connect an Asterisk box

I'm pretty sure Asterisk can use a cellphone over Bluetooth.

True. I was talking personal use only because that's where mobiles have replaced land lines.

What's especially strange about this tend is how something like gmail blows facebook messaging away in terms of UX.

A lot of users though seem to have made Facebook their web world and are willing to accept a crappier messaging system for the convenience.

And it's not early adopters making the switch. I've been using FB for well over 6 years, but I still prefer to send an email over an fb message. Most of my friends are the same.

I may be being slow on the uptake not to have spotted this before, but it hit me last week -

99% of my personal mail - both email and physical mail - is either companies sending out notices (adverts, bills, whatever...) or websites I subscribe to telling me there's something I should see. Direct personal communication has very largely shifted off the platform.

Interestingly, that doesn't yet seem to be the case for corporate communication (into which I include somem voluntary work I do). I still send and receive plenty of email on that account, but this has me wondering for how much longer....

Cut that crap out. That's why people hate email. It is trivial in almost all cases nowadays to get off of those sorts of lists.

Today I have gotten emails: interview info from MS, an announcement as to why the University's power went out, payroll setup info for my Uni, tech advice from a startup friend, and an email from my TA about my lab today.

None of that would have been visible/accessible or possible to communicate to me through anything besides email.

Actually, that _is_ pruned. I'm only getting the notices I want / need for various reasons, not the spam, and do periodically dump senders who aren't interesting any more. Yet I still end up with eMail as overwhelmingly a commercial medium.

And Facebook basically still has those things that are the non-personal emails, they just took them out of the mail stream and put them into your wall.

This is very true. I'm 20 and I've never used my personal email regularly and I'm sure most of my friends haven't either. We've always used MSN or AIM and more recently Facebook to keep in touch.

I'm in my 40s and get more Facebook messages from my friends than I do emails. Many more.

I hadn't thought about it before, but same for me. The only friends who contact me through email are other programmers.

how do you send attachments?

I don't need to send attachments to my friends very often. If I did I'd send it via MSN or email it to them.

I can see the business & college need for email but for friend to friend communication Facebook messaging is already dominant.

But at least here in the US, every incoming first year student at a university in college has to have an email, and receives multiple emails per day from professors, administrators, etc. Email is still a huge part of the current college infrastructure, that could change, but I don't see it happening overnight.

So you never purchase anything online?

I still email occasionally but only when necessary. That's why I said I'm not a regularly user. My point is that I've never used email for friend to friend communication.

I'm a 30-somthing urban professional and almost no one I know still uses MSN or AIM. Tons of people use gchat and gmail, including people who used facebook first. Looking at my adium contacts right now, there are more people signed into gchat than facebook chat, only one signed into MSN and AIM.

My wife's friends are the same way. Sure, lots of them have facebook accounts, but all of her friends and business contacts, new and old, email and gchat regularly. She doesn't even have a facebook account yet and has no intention of ever setting one up.

In fact, I feel less pressure to use facebook these days than I did a year or two ago. I don't even go on it anymore other than when I'm working on apps that use the graph api. My wall is filled with stuff I don't care about and if I want to contact someone I email, chat or text them.

We live in the past here in New Zealand.

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