Saturday, March 1, 2008

Email is dying?

Email is antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it. This seemed to be the consensus on how email is for speakers and several participants at the Future of Web Apps conference.

According to Kevin Marks, Google engineer and Technorati veteran, e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank."

Likewise, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.

Several industry players are aware of the decline of email popularity. Social networks, spams, and the introduction of new messaging services are some of the culprits. Nevertheless, email's death is something remotely possible (for me). It has been said that the younger generation relies on social networking websites for messaging. Well, how do users register in social networking websites in the first place? They'd need some email address of course! Email popularity may suffer some decline primarily in terms of usage frequency. It will not die too soon though--not even in the next couple of centuries.

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