Why Email isn't Dying
gaborcselle.com
gaborcselle.com
When I first started college, a lot of social communication was through IM and Facebook. That's what was used for setting up group outings or dinners or what not.
Now, sending group emails has replaced that. Twitter has emerged as a place for idle chatter. And Facebook is now mostly a rolodex or a place to keep in touch with acquaintances and people I talk to less often.
But email is the backstop. Every other service feeds my email account, and my email account is where I talk to my most regular contacts.
Email is till considered leeding edge for a lot of traditional business, with the phone being the preferred comm tool still.
I really wish email was better, threaded, open .. you name it but it just isn't happening.
I'm shocked (and pleased) when a client messages me on FB or through TW. Although it always leads to a phone call or email (not to mention face-to-face meeting) when we "get down to it".
Even though the traffic between SMTP servers is in plaintext, encrypting that traffic does not solve the underlying problem. Trust on the Internet is a very very hard problem that is not going to be solved any time soon.
(Unless you take "orthogonal" and "parallel" to mean "there's a vector in one and a vector in the other that are orthogonal/parallel".)
Email, or whatever its purposes is, will not go away, but it can be improved and adapted to modern needs.
As popular as Facebook and Twitter (et al) are they are technically proprietary.
Email isn't dying simply because there is, as yet, no successor.
And it has yet to take over the world
While I still use email just as much for business communication, I hardly use it at all for just talking to friends and family.
When I was in college I could have made the claim that AOL Instant Messenger would become the 'one true' messenger because everyone I knew was on it... while in the rest of the world people were mostly using things like ICQ and/or MSN Messenger.
Just because the world around you looks one way doesn't mean it's the same everywhere. Just because a large number of people use and interact with Twitter doesn't mean that everyone does or that everyone even knows what it is for that matter.
That was the idea. I'm not Wolfram Alpha, I'm a human having a conversation. I didn't make any predictions about the future, I'm just expressing my own personal take on the situation. I'm sure I'm going to get down-modded to hell for this especially since you've been up-modded pretty high for contributing basically nothing.
"Just because the world around you looks one way doesn't mean it's the same everywhere."
The ironic part about your AOL/ICQ/MSN example is that, like Facebook, there are network effects. I used ICQ pretty much right up until nobody else did. People are communicating by Facebook so much that even though I don't use it much, if I want to be in the loop that is where I need to go. There are 250 million people communicating on Facebook -- clearly there's a lot less need to communicate by email.
My own personal experience is that for the average user trying to communicate for non-business means, they get a far better experience from other tools than from email.
Now, of course, this all just my personal option. If you want some actual data, you won't find it on hacker news.
And there are lots more social networks besides Facebook. For example, in the Netherlands there's hyves.nl and I'm sure the same is true for other countries.
On the other hand, conveying actual information is also good sometimes. If someone asks me a sytem administration question and I have a few minutes, they usually get a pretty useful answer. I know several system problems at prgmr.com were solved by a customer because when s/he complained, I gave a full description of the actual problem and the customer was able to help me solve it.
So yeah, it depends on what you are doing, and the literacy level (and interest) of the recipient. Email can be short, when appropriate, and learning how to be to the point is a very good skill, but email can also be long and detailed when you need that.
IM? IM is dying on its own. Whatever Facebook this week? Spare me. Wave? It's too hard. Twitter? How would I fit information in 140 chars and why?
Email has no successor technology.
Traditional IM is suffering, IMO: Twitter, Social networks and Skype ate its users. And, paradoxically, even Email.
Maybe it's just me who use them less and less? No idea.
That said, it's a fact that the current generation of teenagers generally don't send personal email and view it as something their parents and teachers use.
But I definitely use it to talk to members of the older generation. And anything that's less than personal, in fact. Any sort of business arrangements, anything that's supposed to look professional.
In fact, the lack of time constraints on email make it far superior to most newer technologies for anything that requires some thought. Email gives you a chance to (re)consider your argument, idea, or response. And to spellcheck.
(Irony: Firefox spellchecker picked up "spellcheck" as incorrect. More irony: "spellchecker" is fine.)
But since then, everyone I know has moved somewhere else. If you want to seek out a deep long-term conversation and you can't get in physical proximity to do so, email does that quite well.
I think mailing lists are a powerful tool as well - they should probably be used more. I hate using Facebook, even though it's valuable as a Rolodex replacement.
Same.
The one major benefit (I found) of email is that the other person has no way of finding out when / if your online.
the amusing thing is that I use email for everything; most of my activity on twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc... is business related. But then, I'm not a professional.