Ask HN: I Predict the End of Email in 5 Years, What Do You Think?

Can you define what you mean by "the end of email" please. Do you literally mean no use of protocols like smtp, imap and pop? Or do you figuratively mean no use, so a 90%/95%/99% reduction in legitimate (non-spam) use?

It's worth noting that mailing lists could have been replaced by blogs and web-based forums a decade ago, but they were not. Before that, usenet was arguably superior to mailing lists, but it was usenet that died out{1} and mailing lists survived and thrived.

It's worth noting too that though newspapers are being killed off by the internet+tv+radio, they are still around, and will continue to be around for much more than a decade, despite repeated predictions of their imminent demise.

So, even if you can persuade me that e-mail will die out (you haven't), I will remain sceptical that it will happen within 10 years. Certainly not within 5.

{1}: Usenet is still around. Apparently.

P.S. "Email's a standard dating back to the 1970's, but amazingly continues to be widely used..." AM radio dates back even further and continues to be widely used also, despite the long-available superior technology of FM radio.

great points, it's more figurative, i just needed a catchy title ;)

i think social app communication features are much more usable than email, there's also a linkage between users in social apps that can be leveraged to provide even higher levels of usability: CRM integration with contact management, calendar, customer support, etc.

imagine that your company got rid of email altogether and used something like a facebook app for all communications.

i view facebook and social apps as a communication tool with multiple dimensions as compared to email, a social app being a superset of email. so why carry forward email, other than that it's a legacy standard being used by a lot of users at the moment.

imagine business cards of the future:

Name

Social App ID

there would obviously be some time before this would effectively take hold of the greater amounts of users, but i think that time is soon.

if facebook added an administrative interface and made it multi-tenented, the pitch could be to throw out your exchange server over time. i'm not sure what the worth to their strategy would be in the future to take on enterprise users, but i imagine it's quite valuable.

I think it is more likely that social network sites will incorporate e-mail clients that come preintegrated with calendars etc.

E-mail would be part of how different social networking sites interoperate.

E-mail is a patchwork of proven standards.

E-mail might vanish into the plumbing of the internet --- as ip addresses have and urls might --- but it will still be there.

If my company got rid of e-mail altogether and used Facebook instead, we'd lose customers.

Catchy titles grab attention, but they obscure meaning. I still don't know what you are predicting.

i answered in another thread so didn't feel like repeating; but basically you'd need a phased approach to get off email, it wouldn't happen overnight. from day one at company x, you'd get an email address and social id, you'd have both mechanisms for communication. over time the benefits of a social app would most likely outweigh the benefits of email and a natural progression would occur, i.e. lots of companies will start to adopt it.

i use email now only because it's a legacy standard though this is definitely decreasing in favor of social apps. this is analogous to television and internet.

my prediction is that a social app will take over email as the primary internet communication method and you will start to see this manifest itself very soon, even inside of corporations.

A recent report by Comscore stated that: email usage declined among those aged between 12 and 17 by 59%. (http://bit.ly/eSiT93) - perhaps social media will be the answer?

There is of course a function question here as well, i.e. younger people are simply communicating with each other socially (as you note), and so it makes sense to go via facebook.

I think in the work place, email is still needed, as you say it's the only 'anonymous' method of communication. Unless collaborative tools such as group chat, instant messenger, or others, become so ubiquitous that there is no need to have a simple form of direct communication.

thanks for adding data points, and one thing i failed to point out is that email is a standard. the standard is what allows different vendors to provide interoperability. so a microsoft exchange server can talk to a mac mail app and mail generated by lotus notes could be stored and processed by gmail.

until a standard is created to say what should be included in the "communication tool to supercede email", you're stuck using email and loosely coupled instances of apps x, y, z.

it would be pretty hard to get a large company to shift off email, perhaps getting employees onto a social platform in conjunction with email will be a nice transition path.

imagine stepping into a new job and on day one getting an email address and a social app ID. i think this could be a big play that could get more and more users off of email, the old way, and onto the new way.

Personal communications ("Hey, how are you doing? / Are you busy tonight?") are increasingly drifting to text and social apps, but there are some significant barriers (IMHO) to businesses adopting any existing social platform for communication (namely, loss of control). However, I think it's very likely that mail clients will more closely resemble social apps. Google Wave was a step in that direction, but it wasn't quite ready for prime time.

what's to say that facebook couldn't add an administrative interface and multi-tenancy so that businesses could manage and use this without any privacy fears?

I think you made a typo because you have "business," "Facebook" and "no privacy fears" in the same sentence.

I don't think any Social App will be able to replace email unless it is just as distributed and private as email is. Maybe if the Social App ran entirely on the users machine or they could run their own servers then it would have a chance to overtake email. Maybe something like Diaspora? The fact is, people send IMPORTANT emails. People who send these emails aren't going to have their correspondence in the cloud being raked through to squeeze advertising money out.

i think the privacy issue could be very easily taken care of by providing multi-tenancy and administrative access so a company could control everything to do with the content.

your point about social app companies trying to make money out of the companies using this is valid, however, today Salesforce.com provides software in the cloud that stores tons of information about sales deals (including dollar figures), contacts (which is priceless), user behaviors, etc. yet lots of the fortune 500 trust them to host and keep this data.

I think the difference, for me at least, is that I have to pay for Salesforce's products. I trust a company with my data much more if I am paying them than I do a company that is not charging but instead using my data for advertising purposes. There is a lot more incentive to look at the data if you need to target ads at people.

Do you have any evidence that email use is declining? Email isn't just the end user application, email is a massively distributed and open messaging infrastructure

social apps are also not just a an end user application, it's also a massively distributed and open messaging infrastructure. :)

I wouldn't call any social messaging apps that I've seen "massively distributed". "Painfully centralised and proprietary" maybe. I wouldn't use the term infrastructure for them either.

If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, the Internet would continue to function just fine. If email disappeared, we would be royally screwed.

Facebook could disappear for political, legal or financial reasons. Email can't.

regarding facebook, it's just an example, it could easily be twitter, orkut, mixi, etc. what i mentioned in other threads is that there should be a standard created for the new communication method to supersede email. that way vendors could start to produce their own solutions just like email does with ms exchange, lotus notes, gmail, zimbra, sendmail, etc. different clients could also be created: mac mail, gmail, thunderbird, pine, elm, etc.

i agree that facebook is proprietary, but i disagree respectfully that facebook is centralized, they have many datacenters around the world, it's a necessary when you're getting 400M page hits a day and whatever many TB's of photos being uploaded. so do friendster, myspace, orkut, twitter, linkedin, etc.

I was also just using Facebook as an example. The other examples you just provided are the same.

What is wrong with the current group of email standards? And why can't those problems be fixed by extending the existing standards?

Facebook is centralised. It is run by a single profit motivated company. I can't set up a Facebook messaging server. I can set up an email server. Email is distributed because anyone can set up a server.

Nobody I know interleves their response when replying. How about an email client that doesn't allow this, like facebook.

my coworkers are notorious for this, you often get emails like:

>> 1. What is the performance impact?

[john doe] this depends on the anticipated load...

are you talking about facebook email? does it prevent you from quoting text?

I always interleave my responses:

  A: Because otherwise it doesn't make sense
  Q: Why do questions always come before answers?