on email...

[acroyear]

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail - Cringely on technology:

Then in the last year something new has happened, which I see as the combined rise of mobile Internet technology and Facebook. While smartphones have made us more e-mail-enabled than ever, I think people are actually sending less total e-mail as a result, substituting SMS texting and mobile use of social networks.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

And don’t forget that our youngest networked generation — teenagers — doesn’t e-mail at all, preferring the immediacy and intimacy of texting to almost anything else.

E-mail will never completely die, but I feel it has lost critical mass and is fading rapidly. That’s why when Facebook announced Titan, its new inter-user communication platform, they had such a hard time explaining what it was. Zuckerberg & Co. want us to see Titan as the universal communicator but they feel they can’t, at the same time, say that other media are dying as a result. They don’t want to be seen as the predators they are.

But predators are an essential part of any healthy ecosystem, remember. So this is all good, I guess.

Sad, but good.

Comments

[zombie-dog.livejournal.com]

Whenever I read an article predicting the decline, fall, or 'death' of a concept, I have this weird muscle spasm that causes me to roll my eyes sarcastically.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

trouble is, in this case the decline is there, and noted. "classic" email today serves 2 purposes: spam, and notifications/reminders (you have a bill, you have a flight, you have an evite, thanks for your purchase here's a copy of your receipt) and at its worse, notifications for something happening elsewhere: "your friend just posted a reply to your comment". that's pretty much it.

some mail groups still exist (FBMM in our shared case), but even there more mailing lists exist for announcements than collaboration, and services like yahoo and google make it so you can avoid email and just go straight to an archiving website.

(i'm leaving off professional email, since those rarely ever actually leave your company's servers.)

i get very few actual personal emails anymore. in fact the most recent one I received had a simple reply: i went to my facebook and cut-n-pasted a copy of something I wrote there months ago... :)

so yeah, one can roll the eyes, but here the sentiment is, I believe, accurate.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

Oh really? I didn't realize that was a cut-n-paste (granted, it wasn't a 'big' email).

I still use email as a good way to have long talks with some people.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

the email mentioned was a request from an FBMMer about Vegas and Cirque shows. :)