Is Email Dead? I Think Not

I happened to stumble upon this today and must admit, I am amazed how many people believe the hype behind “Web 2.0″. Seriously, it just blows my mind. What really stopped me in my tracks is the belief that privacy nightmares like Facebook or MySpace are going to one day replace email. Guess what, we have been here already – RSS anyone?

It was long since believed by myself among a host of others that distributing written content would eventually be done almost exclusively via RSS. Yet despite serious adoption in this area with Firefox, IE 7, Opera, real results have yet to even make a dent in world of email delivery for people subscribing to content in with their email addresses. So how in the world can we believe that email is going to be replaced by some social application used for personal communication?

Then you have to consider the business aspect to this. I can see it now. Multi-million dollar business deals will one day take place during a MySpace get-together. There will be talk of “profile theming” and the sudden changes in the stock market – give me a break!

As for the spam argument, this is only a problem for people using ineffective filtering. Outlook users, consider Spambayes. Everyone else, POPFile or simply select a web mail service offering IMAP mail and self-updating spam filtering that works.

With all of this said, there is simply no question that Facebook provides some fantastic funcionality with their web applications being introduced. But relying on them for my email in its current form simply is not one of its benefits I’m afraid. No, people that do use Facebook, Twitter and MySpace for ‘messaging” capabilities are likely the same ones who are creating calluses on their fingers from text messaging their friends in high school. It’s nice to have access to this level of messaging, but regular people are not relying on it exclusively.