The nature of email is certainly shifting towards business dealings, as this article states. However, it's more than that: traditional email is also becoming a message aggregator. As social utilities, such as Facebook, MySpace, etc continue to utilize their own messaging systems, email acts as a feed reader to notify you when you have a message in any of your more specialized systems. So rather than it being the message itself, it becomes the messenger of a message.
> So rather than it being the message itself, it becomes the messenger of a message.
Which is ridiculous. Facebook and MySpace can still get hits on their webpage by forcing you to reply by going to the page but having to go to a different site to read a message is annoying.
