The death of e-mail - "Email is increasingly for old people, as kids turn to IM etc." | Hacker News Reader

The death of e-mail - "Email is increasingly for old people, as kids turn to IM etc."

slate.com

7 pointsnickb8 comments

Jesus... yet another email bashing BS. Email has always been for "old people" because it's (mostly) a working tool. Kids don't like to do work, they like to play.

It's like saying that "doing dishes is dead. leaving them dirty all over the place is the future".

I see you've been a guest in my modern kitchen.

that's a terrible analogy, basically saying that texting/IM are counter-productive, which is often, but not necessarily true.

It is more like: email is a cockroach. Sure it is ugly, but it will still be around long after the rise and fall of prettier creatures like Twitter or Facebook.

I would like to abandon "email" as a metaphor. Its not like the -protocols- are going anywhere, but I've thought before of routing all my email (= server, Gmail, Y!mail, and college FirstClass) to IM. That would centralize all my "messages", and make it easier to check all my accounts on my cell. IMs are already logged and stored if I'm offline.

I just did a cursory search, and it doesn't seem there's a way to do it directly in iChat or Adium. It'd probably be easiest to do it through Jabber. I don't know enough about XMPP though... Anyone have an idea how to go about this?

i'd love to have something like that, since most of the time I access different sites and apps, I'm looking for a small amount of specific data, such as the content of my most recent email, my facebook notifications, a date from my google calendar, etc, and frankly don't need all the flashy UI and the redundant clicking to access them. If i can access my email via IM by simply sending "read newest gmail" to a specified SN, my life would be just a little bit easier.

Yeah, actually, a good bot would be really awesome -- I could ask for messages from a specific account, person, by un/read status, etc. or delete spam, get message history, and so on.

Hell, why not just make a "smart command line" bot-based web app? It's the goddamn twenty-first century, why do we still manually navigate when we can just concisely -ask- (in words, not "commands" or "actions") for portions of sites, definitions, files, apps, etc.? This was how it was -supposed- to be, but for some reason we're still just using glossed up versions of 1980s (or earlier) paradigms. Why hasn't the A.I. scene done anything practical? Or are those guys all just too enamored with the beauty of 1950s technology?

the article is garbage, but i gotta give the author props for his tremendous indecision on this non-issue, as displayed in the subheading: "Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to?"

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