I'll admit, I'm guilty of notifying friends and family of what's happening in my life via Twitter and Facebook, instead of taking the time to send an email. And it seems a lot of friends are doing the same thing — a personalized email from a good friend is becoming more and more of a special treat.
Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal is boldly saying that email is on its way out. Their justification:
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.
The article cites constant streams of information in real-time, gathered via services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Wave, is starting to replace email. It also asserts that email was better the way we used to use the Internet — logging on and checking it from time to time. What do you think? Do you ever see real-time updates replacing email?
Splendid
Barbara Bui
McQ by Alexander McQueen
Email isn't going to go away anytime soon but this article highlights the unavoidable fact that social media is quickly replacing traditional (er, electronic) forms of communication. Social networking, SMS, MMS, tweets and the like have the advantage of immediacy in an easily absorbable form which is why so many have adopted them as their preferred method of communication - after all, we live in a sound bite world don't we? I predict that these new forms of communication will continue to become more unified such that in the future there may not be a distinction between SMS and MMS, then text and social posts.
1I don't think email is on its way out. Facebook and Twitter updates can be sent out to a group of people and are a bit public, but if you need to send someone a personal, private message, email is the way to go.
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