On the death of e-mail

Spotted: a lot of buzz about the bleak and/or brilliant future of e-mail lately…

• The death of e-mail. (Slate Magazine)
  Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to?
• Email is Still Not Dead (Zoli’s Blog)
  “Yet-another-email-is-dead-article, this time on Slate. It’s the same old argument: teenagers using IM, or increasingly SMS, and most recently Facebook instead of email … – hence email usage will decline. I beg to differ.
• Email Is NOT Dead (Publishing 2.0)
  “The death of email meme is completely absurd. Email is NOT going to die because, as Charlie O’Donnell points out, EVERYONE HAS EMAIL. That’s why we all get so much spam and other useless email — because it’s a guaranteed way to reach us.”
• Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network (Bits)
  “Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.”
• “Inbox 2.0” – Email as social networking platform
  “Driving E-mail forward”

My take: e-mail is a tool. And a pretty blunt one at that. If better tools come along, everybody will start moving to those pretty swiftly. But messaging from one person to the next one will obviously be around for much longer, be it by SMS, e-mail, facebook poke, twitter or Instant Messaging. It’s all the same thing, really, it’s just the form that’s evolving.
And that’s excellent: 500 years ago we did it with a pig’s bladder tied around our willy, then we invented rubber, then the pill, next we’ll be doing exclusively via webcam. But hey, it’s still birth control 😉