Why Email No Longer Rules…

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

"The whole idea of this email service isn't really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks," says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Full story:
The End of the Email Era - WSJ.com

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Also worth adding, the social network side of things, gets the message to more in one hit, and emails a pain in the butt at the moment as its open on 3 different machines due to a cross over, so its driving me nuts

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Although I'm always going to need email for business purposes, how our personal and business lives interact will dictate the email system we use, or how we implement it.

For example, I mainly work in the office, but sometimes work at home, so it makes life easier to work from a decent spec laptop. But to get email, I have to connect to the office, which is where our mail server lives, via a VPN as I want that extra bit of security. So this makes email quite a clumsy form of communication, when I can log onto any PC and fire up twitter or facebook to get a quick message out.

All serving different purposes, but will be interesting to look back in 20 years and wonder how we survived with our antiquated email system

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cheers Steve
Forum Admin - teaboy and general gofer...

Forum Rules and FAQ's at a glance | Find me on Google+ | or even Facebook!

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If you're here to spam, then expect a ban