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.