The End Of The Email Era

Wall Street Journal:

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.

Read the whole story: Wall Street Journal

Comments

[thenewdawg]

All these print lines from a WSJ Tech reporter to inform us of how she can know where her friends are?
Alternate title. "How a trained journalist de-volved..." It's amazing how people can legitimize "Wastebook" as some kind of consciousness raising connectiveness.

Log off and get a life.

[fnordzap]

I personally think Facebook and Twitter, etc. are the ever-updating obituaries of friendship. Or at any rate they chart out such a meager territory for friendship that people who really care about their friendships don't really conduct them there.

I envision all my friends who do this seriously to be just quietly drifting away from me sending little virtual post-it notes saying "Don't forget me just yet.".

[Paramendra Bhagat]

Email is not dead yet, but it is no longer be all. It has evolved, will evolve further. It will stick around though.

[Inquisitr]

Yeah yeah, heard the same thing when we got IMs years ago.

E-mail works with these things, facebook isn't making it go away. and once people realize how much of your privacy is lost on facebook, they'll use it even less.

[Lakeview Greg]

Wonderful, now we can mis-understand the other person even quicker than before!!
Quicker, not better.
Hey, in 20 years no kid is going to know how to write in cursive, either. They'll probably call it corrosive writing by then.

[levi501]

We've started to eliminate email from our corporate dialogue. E-mail works but 140 characters is the key to Twitters functionality...

[Gasparilla]

I don't have a cell phone. If I needed one for business I would have one, but I don't. I don't twitter. I don't need to know what you're doing at this very instant. I tell people if they need to tell me something, call me. I check e mail twice a week.

[alienator]

Of course it's the end of the E-mail.

I just figured it out.

[sdca4251]

Is this a joke?

[auramac]

End of e-mail? I don't think so. We'll be far sicker of bloggers first.

[KingCujo]

WSJ has it way wrong, probably due to Ruper who doesn't have a clue about technology per recent article in Vani y Fair.

[wijg]

Twitter, facebook... no thanks. My life is fast paced enough, why make it more so? Give me peace and quiet.

[WeAreTheWorld]

Oh, I'm sooo excited!!!

(Eyes rolling into the back of my head)

[Merin]

Crap. What a stupid article.

Social networking isn't exactly a fad, per se, at least I'd call it more of a phase. Too many people are acting like this is all new.

Using computers to chat to each other has been around for decades. "Instant messaging" as well (at least prior to it being branded as such.) This twitter crap? It is largely useless and will phase into something else that may, or may not, be more useful. Like PDAs (which were largely only useful to a portion of society) merged with cell phones, which I'm not advocating as a good or bad thing here, and game consoles are merging with video rental and online purchasing (again, basically just becoming a normal computer more and more each generation), social networking will eventually simply be an aspect of something else, something bigger and (hopefully) better.

But replace email? That's like saying cars replaced bicycles - they superficially do the same thing, but when you actually look at the two things you realize they actually serve different needs.

[hopefull2008]

Have you tried lately emailing someone under the age of 25 (outside of business) ? They don't check their accounts anymore. I end up IMing them to get them to check their email.

[Merin]

Actually, yes. I'm in my 30's and hang out with a group of friends who include people in their very early twenties, and while many of them text each other my means of contacting them about stuff is email. And it works.

I'm pretty sure I've seen several articles recently about how teens and young adults don't twitter or facebook, that it's a phenomenon for those post-college.

Saying that kids don't email anymore because of twitter or the like is like saying that kids don't talk on the phone anymore because of text messaging. Just because they can get away with texting at times they couldn't talk on the phone - again, car vs. bike, different uses.

I will agree that texting has replaced email for ongoing conversations with certain people (though I have a 25 year old friend whom we can have an ongoing email-chain up to 40 messages in one sitting), and twittering has replaced mass emails (which were annoying as heck anyway, so yay) but wanting to get a semi-private message to just a handful of people, email is the way to go.

[DinSea]

Misleading headline - a better one would be, "E-mail is no longer king"