yea, this topic has been beaten to the ground many times by a lot of bloggers. and yet i still use email every single day. if it’s dying, i’ll be jack kavorkian and help make it as painless and easy as possible. but what are we really replacing email with? instant messages and social networking status changes? could you really do the same thing on aim or twitter that you do using email? i’m going to go with a big resounding “no” here. perhaps email isn’t dying. perhaps online communications are just evolving into more distinctive and customizable forms. so in the end, you have an idea that you wish to convey to the world. depending on the idea content and the scope of social interaction you desire, you can choose a medium of communication that is custom-suited to how you want to interact with the world. whether that be email, instant messenger, twitter, facebook status, myspace status, etc. this reminds me that i wanted to look for a program which could handle all forms of online communication. digsby was an interesting experiment, but was far too buggy and left a huge footprint on my system. anyone else have any ideas?
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At my company, we use blogs and IM a lot but haven’t implemented it to the whole company. For those that are on it, I never see an email. When that becomes more widely adapted, I can imagine being email free very soon.
I actually expect that to happen over the next couple years – as soon as we can get a project management tool I can see my inbox disappearing…
Oddly enough, I don’t work at a tech company with employees familiar with new tools – I work with people who can sometimes barely use word – but they’ve had no problem getting on a blog and watching their feeds…pretty cool.
That’s actually amazing. I even know a couple of techies who never even use rss/atom/xml feeds.
I don’t know about email disappearing though… We mainly use email and IM at work. I find it pretty badass that you guys do team communication through blogs. I never thought of doing that before. I guess you DO learn something new every day
It seems to me that email/blogs are the vehicle for more organized and coherent thought display. Messages that are usually no more than a couple of lines and convey simple ideas are more appropriate for the twitter/IM platform. You’d be surprised at how often I email whole letters to people that I chat with online. I dunno… Maybe it’s not email becoming obsolete… Maybe it’s the content that’s becoming obsolete. In this case, “content” meaning long organized thoughts as opposed to short snippets and fragments of text…