

Why Email isn't Dying - judegomila
http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2009/10/7-points-on-end-of-email-era.html

======
albertsun
I'm a senior in college right now. Over the past four years it seems email has
become more popular in my cohort.

When I first started college, a lot of social communication was through IM and
Facebook. That's what was used for setting up group outings or dinners or what
not.

Now, sending group emails has replaced that. Twitter has emerged as a place
for idle chatter. And Facebook is now mostly a rolodex or a place to keep in
touch with acquaintances and people I talk to less often.

But email is the backstop. Every other service feeds my email account, and my
email account is where I talk to my most regular contacts.

~~~
josefresco
Just wait until you get into the business world. Before I went pro, I was all
IM all the time (I'm old so FB/TW wasn't around)

Email is till considered _leeding edge_ for a lot of traditional business,
with the phone being the preferred comm tool still.

I really wish email was better, threaded, open .. you name it but it just
isn't happening.

I'm shocked (and pleased) when a client messages me on FB or through TW.
Although it always leads to a phone call or email (not to mention face-to-face
meeting) when we "get down to it".

~~~
albertsun
What I was trying to say is that over the past four years email has replaced
IM, Facebook and Twitter as the "leading edge" for my social interactions now,
even though I'm not in the business world. They were popular, but they're now
mostly on the periphery.

------
the_real_r2d2
E-mail is broken in many ways (not just SPAM and overfilled inboxes) but I
think there is not yet anything better. Facebook, twitter, social nets are
still in the process to become effective ways of communication. Google Wave
seems promising, not as the "the new e-mail" (I think that is just hype) but
as a collaborative way of working. IMHO e-mail will be replaced for such a
type of tool (similar to Wave) where you will have elements of e-mail, IM,
tweets and social networks.

~~~
jvdh
What is so broken about email? (apart from spam)

~~~
the_real_r2d2
The way that we use it today for example. Many people have inbox full of
emails that probably they would not read or attend properly. This is
behavioural, not a technical issue but it is an example of why we need other
collaborative models. There is a good article about it in the IEEE magazine.
In the technical and security side, quite a lot of traffic between SMTP
servers is in clear text. Identity is very easy to spoof. And so on ... But as
I said, there isn't anything better yet.

~~~
jvdh
an inbox full of emails that you do not read is a behavorial problem. Not one
of email. No amount of twitter, facebook or "email 2.0" is going to fix that.

Even though the traffic between SMTP servers is in plaintext, encrypting that
traffic does not solve the underlying problem. Trust on the Internet is a very
very hard problem that is not going to be solved any time soon.

~~~
zokier
Trust on the Internet has a solution. SSL with proper CAs. Then the problem
atleast shifts from Internet to real world.

~~~
the_real_r2d2
The problem today are the cost of the infrastructure to support CAs (this may
be a minor problem) and usability (I think this is the most difficult to
address). I cannot imagine many of my FB friends using PGP (or GnuPG), public
and private keys.

~~~
zokier
They wouldn't need to. In simple cases like facebook, they would use some CA
signed certificate (which basically says that they are who they claim to be)
to sign in to facebook via ssl/https (this could be easily automatized in
browser).

~~~
the_real_r2d2
Yes but then you need a certificate to store (your private key). If you are in
the same computer it is not a problem, if you move to another one, then you
need to take the certificate with you. I think the problem is not as easy if
you want proper security mechanisms.

------
pixcavator
Twitter is both orthogonal and parallel to email, nice!

~~~
holygoat
Isn't that possible considering planes in more than two dimensions?

~~~
gjm11
Not unless either Twitter or email equals zero.

(Unless you take "orthogonal" and "parallel" to mean "there's a vector in one
and a vector in the other that are orthogonal/parallel".)

~~~
DrJokepu
If I remember correctly, two lines being both parallel and orthogonal is quite
possible in Hyperbolic (Non-Euclidean) Geometry.

~~~
10ren
Parallel lines of longitude converge orthogonally at poles.

------
JoeAltmaier
There's more to it than preference, fad and fashion. Tools get replaced when a
better one comes along that transmits messages that exist near the same point
in { Fidelity, Latency } space. Telephone calls are pretty high fidelity, zero
latency (if they're answered). Snail mail is for high fidelity, high-latency
messages (like phone bills). Nobody would snail-mail a lunch invitation any
more - too high a latency. And so on. Twitter is lower latency than IM; IM is
lower than email. They vary in fidelity (Twitter's 120-char limit). There
remain room for a whole menagerie of tools in between, above and below. And
these will be eclipsed when higher-fidelity replacements get invented. Btw
somebody explain to me why its ok to automatically switch a phone call (low-
latency, high-fidelity) to voice mail (abysmal latency, half-duplex crap
fidelity)? This really bugs me. I don't set up voice mail because its
absolutely the wrong choice - send me an email if you can't get me on the
phone, or an IM or pretty much ANYTHING but voice mail.

------
chrischen
I agree email serves a very important purpose. It's the open standard way of
receiving messages between computers. We'll always need a way for people to
send each other messages using their computers with an open standard.

Email, or whatever its purposes is, will not go away, but it can be improved
and adapted to modern needs.

------
ErrantX
Ultimately Email is a _standard_ communication form.

As popular as Facebook and Twitter (et al) are they are technically
proprietary.

Email isn't dying simply because there is, as yet, no successor.

~~~
zokier
XMPP is open protocol, and has lots of (FOSS) implementations. It could
probably be easily extended to do anything email does, and do it better.

And it has yet to take over the world

------
jsz0
The important thing about all these different services is how you decide to
include people. It's more of a real organic social network where some casual
friends might be Facebook worthy but have no reason to ever e-mail me
personally. Others might not be personal contacts but are interesting enough
to warrant a Twitter follow. Some business contacts are people I wouldn't mind
IM-ing me outside of work -- others goto a separate IM account I only login to
during business hours. Some people have full access.

------
wvenable
I don't know very many people who still use email for _personal_
communication. It's all Twitter, Facebook, Skype, or just IM. Even my parents
seem to able to navigate Facebook just fine but have considerably more trouble
with their email client.

While I still use email just as much for business communication, I hardly use
it at all for just talking to friends and family.

~~~
pyre
The problem with using data like this is that it's completely anecdotal and
self-selecting.

When I was in college I could have made the claim that AOL Instant Messenger
would become the 'one true' messenger because everyone I knew was on it...
while in the rest of the world people were mostly using things like ICQ and/or
MSN Messenger.

Just because the world around you looks one way doesn't mean it's the same
everywhere. Just because a large number of people use and interact with
Twitter doesn't mean that _everyone_ does or that _everyone_ even knows what
it is for that matter.

~~~
wvenable
"The problem with using data like this is that it's completely anecdotal and
self-selecting."

That was the idea. I'm not Wolfram Alpha, I'm a human having a conversation. I
didn't make any predictions about the future, I'm just expressing my own
personal take on the situation. I'm sure I'm going to get down-modded to hell
for this especially since you've been up-modded pretty high for contributing
basically nothing.

"Just because the world around you looks one way doesn't mean it's the same
everywhere."

The ironic part about your AOL/ICQ/MSN example is that, like Facebook, there
are network effects. I used ICQ pretty much right up until nobody else did.
People are communicating by Facebook so much that even though I don't use it
much, if I want to be in the loop that is where I need to go. There are 250
million people communicating on Facebook -- clearly there's a lot less _need_
to communicate by email.

My own personal experience is that for the average user trying to communicate
for non-business means, they get a far better experience from other tools than
from email.

Now, of course, this all just my personal option. If you want some actual
data, you won't find it on hacker news.

------
tdm911
the biggest reason i believe email is not going anywhere is because it is
entrenched in corporate life. enterprise moves slowly and to move from email
to another system would take longer than it took them to embrace email in the
first place (i.e. decades).

------
jvdh
People living in the US really should realise that there is a world outside of
the US. Facebook may be the way of communication for american youths, but it
is not that entrenched in other countries.

~~~
joubert
How do the "youths" in other countries communicate, besides SMS?

~~~
jvdh
MSN is widely popular here.

And there are lots more social networks besides Facebook. For example, in the
Netherlands there's hyves.nl and I'm sure the same is true for other
countries.

------
nopassrecover
The same reason traditional post isn't dead. I still might use IM/facebook for
most personal communications but that doesn't mean I stop checking my email
address or post box.

------
tdewbury
I think that emails use just needs to be adjusted taking hints from tools like
twitter and facebook make it short and to the point.

~~~
lsc
Terseness can be good sometimes; I have a tendency to write really long
emails, even when doing relatively trivial tasks like customer support or
dealing with a salestard. The sales people are all, as the kids would say,
"Tl;dr" then they present me their standard product. Irritating, as that
behavior is trivially replaced by a perl script.

On the other hand, conveying actual information is also good sometimes. If
someone asks me a sytem administration question and I have a few minutes, they
usually get a pretty useful answer. I know several system problems at
prgmr.com were solved by a customer because when s/he complained, I gave a
full description of the actual problem and the customer was able to help me
solve it.

So yeah, it depends on what you are doing, and the literacy level (and
interest) of the recipient. Email can be short, when appropriate, and learning
how to be to the point is a very good skill, but email can also be long and
detailed when you need that.

~~~
tdewbury
Totally agree. Maybe more of the problem is writing skill of the users today
need to be improved. I am always getting long winded emails that could have be
easily said in a short one or two line email and a well phrased subject line.

------
narenrulz
someone had to say it.. The future doesn't replace the past. The future
complements the past

~~~
lacker
Tell that to the silent movie stars.

------
ilyak
Died to what?

IM? IM is dying on its own. Whatever Facebook this week? Spare me. Wave? It's
too hard. Twitter? How would I fit _information_ in 140 chars and why?

Email has no successor technology.

~~~
unalone
Neither IM nor Facebook is dying. Email's not dying either, but your
countersuggestions are absurd.

~~~
ilyak
Didn't say Facebook is dying.

Traditional IM is suffering, IMO: Twitter, Social networks and Skype ate its
users. And, paradoxically, even Email.

Maybe it's just me who use them less and less? No idea.

~~~
unalone
Huh! If you don't count Skype as IM then I agree with you. That's my primary
IM at the moment. But isn't that IM?

~~~
ilyak
I always thought it's more of a phone thingy?

~~~
unalone
Well, it handles text/audio/video chats. But text chatting is still a big part
of it: Right now I'm using it for group work, because it has a great
filesharing system. It's very flexible, but I think it still counts under the
instant messaging umbrella.

------
eli
I don't even think that article needs any response. It's pretty naive.

That said, it's a fact that the current generation of teenagers generally
don't send personal email and view it as something their parents and teachers
use.

~~~
David
As a member of the current generation, I know that I don't often send personal
emails. And yes, it's something my parents and teachers use.

But I definitely use it to talk to members of the older generation. And
anything that's less than personal, in fact. Any sort of business
arrangements, anything that's supposed to look professional.

In fact, the lack of time constraints on email make it far superior to most
newer technologies for anything that requires some thought. Email gives you a
chance to (re)consider your argument, idea, or response. And to spellcheck.

(Irony: Firefox spellchecker picked up "spellcheck" as incorrect. More irony:
"spellchecker" is fine.)

~~~
chipsy
I've found that as I started corresponding more in the "real world," email
took hold as the most important tool I have. When I was a student, less so,
because all I used it for was holding passwords, subscribing to a list or two,
and occasionally communicating with a teacher. All my friends were always
nearby so it wasn't a major issue to just hang out all the time.

But since then, everyone I know has moved somewhere else. If you want to seek
out a deep long-term conversation and you can't get in physical proximity to
do so, email does that quite well.

I think mailing lists are a powerful tool as well - they should probably be
used more. I hate using Facebook, even though it's valuable as a Rolodex
replacement.

~~~
ErrantX
> as I started corresponding more in the "real world," email took hold as the
> most important tool I have.

Same.

The one major benefit (I found) of email is that the other person has no way
of finding out when / if your online.

