Slashdot Mirror
Kids Say Email is Dead
An anonymous reader writes "'E-mail is, like, soooo dead' is the headline at News.com, where a piece looks at youth attitudes towards communication mediums. A group of teenage internet business entrepreneurs confessed that they really only use email to 'talk to adults'. Primarily, these folks are using social networks to communicate. 'More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging. Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old founder and president of MyYearbook.com, was the lone teen entrepreneur who said she still uses e-mail regularly to keep up with camp friends or business relationships. Still, that usage pales in comparison to her habit of text messaging. She said she sends a thousand text messages a month.'"
This only says what youth does, not what they'll use as adults. I'm guessing for more durable and more effective communications the youth of today will opt for something more substantial than "c u 2nit".
Youth today do what they do because it's there, not because it's going to replace traditional communications.
When "we" were young, we passed notes on pieces of paper. The girls passed messages by lip-reading (never understood how they were so good at that). I never saw any articles predicting "note passing", and lip-reading becoming the protocol de jour. If we'd had text messaging, we'd have done it too.
Consider from the article:
That seems to contradict the main thesis of the article. Basically, for important things like business and/or sponsors Martina uses e-mail? The e-mail is not dead, or as the article claims like, soooo dead.Text messaging, social web sites serve a purpose, not replace one. (This is akin the predictions recently "laptops to replace desktops".)
Critical thought, thorough discussion, deep understanding -- none are much served by the text messaging medium. (e-mail doesn't do much for them either.)
They "only use e-mail to 'talk to adults'". They'll use e-mail and more traditional forms of communication when they become adults. It doesn't mean they'll stop using the text messaging and other forms, it just means they'll need the more traditional forms.
i cld b wrng. i hope im not.
When all these kids get in the real world and have more important things to do than pay constant/immediate attention to the cell phone's IM's it won't be so "cool" and useful. An intelligent communication can be handled a lot better through an E-mail (or phone call or in person) than IM'ing.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I don't know about you guys but when ten years ago when I was fourteen, e-mail was dead too. Initially, I used to use Web based IM clients to talk to my friends quickly followed by ICQ and and even later MSN.
I only started using e-mail when my group of friends started working full time. I think the reason for this is that e-mail is mostly open at work because it's required for the business. Moreover, employers don't really care if you e-mail your friends from your account, provided you're not taking the piss. In contrast, browsing social networking sites from work can get you sacked.
In short, there's nothing new here. I think the youngsters of today will follow the same path as I did ten years ago; they will adopt e-mail when their circle of friends grow-up and go to work.
Simon
So people are using _different clients_ to send their ascii messages.
whatever...
Would be surprised to know that SMS is almost exactly the same protocol as SMTP.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Now get the hell off my lawn.
Teenage Social Agenda != Professional Business Applications
/* No Comment */
...is soon I'll be using myspace to update my boss on my TPS reports?
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
In Korea, only old people...
Yes youth use text messaging... But there is another reason... A more realistic reason... COST...
Talking on the phone is expensive. Sending messages is cheap. Do you REALLY think that kids prefer sending messages to talking? "Why when I was young" kids were talking hours and hours on the phone. WHY? Because local calls were FREE... If kids had the option to talking or sending messages via a keyboard, they would have talked, not text messaged...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
radio (not dead)
television (not dead)
the newspaper (not dead)
the cinema house (very not dead)
etc.
no form of mass communication ever dies, it just moves out of the limelight. and then it's called "dead" by people wishing to make a melodrama out of the evolution of media
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... I see this all the time. My take on it: younger people are in a hurry for response. They want immediate replies. But adults (as will these teens eventually) live in a different world, where the speed of response is part of the value but the message itself is important, too. I have to train my students to understand that leaving an email message for me will always result in a response, even if it is a little later, while IM may not.
From another perspective, MySpace and Facebook have messaging features which are simply email in a different form (posting to the web site). I am still at a loss to understand why posting a message on a web site (with the exception of group communication) is more beneficial than sending an email.
Yeah, that's sure to cut you a better than fair sampling of the "youth culture."
And in a related story, a survey of classically-trained teenaged cellists has determined that young people are listening to less hip-hop and have begun to prefer champagne to beer.
Now, how do I text-message "GET OFF OF MY LAWN" ? Anybody...?
All our times have come
Here but now they're gone
Seasons don't fear the reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain
We can be like they are
...and they have no clue what they're talking about. Try handling multiple conversations on multiple topics concurrently on your cell phone. How are you going to send attachments? Search e-mails for pertinent data? Think in full sentences? Write multi-paragraph, logical arguments and positions that are a sign of and required of adulthood? Whoever is relying on text messaging and adding multiple steps by effectively using proprietary online mail on social networking sites isn't a future anything of tomorrow. They'll just float around, not really having any skills or abilities that others would find useful.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Saying email is dead is all fair and well when talking about friends, but any 'kid entrepreneur' who thinks they can use social networking sites entirely is just stupid. "Send your CV's or business requests to my face book page ^_^. chow." Hyped up media bs?
I'm always wondering just how much more annoying cell phones can become. I guess coupling them with "social networks" is simply the next step.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
... Long live email.
P.S. I wish face-to-face speech would die. I hate my coworkers.
Email is only dead for 'wat u doin 2nite' type retardation. You need to be literate to author a worthwhile email, it is therefore no surprise that todays youth are eschewing it.
1000 messages a month? How many cell phones does this kid go through a year? We have blackberries and cell phones at work for signout and they are abused beyond belief. Missing buttons, unresponsive buttons, you name it. I don't see how their phones dont wear off the buttons in a month or 2.
No one likes a place where 40+ year old moms congregate to act "like totally cool and hip"...
sad really...
So he'll have a terrible article to repost tomorrow.
The Farewell Tour II
...only old people use email. Looks like the US has caught up with Korea. I thought the "in Korea..." thing made a good internet meme. It didn't really catch on that well though.
I'm 18. This is old news. My friends only used email back when it was a novelty to us. Then we moved to AIM, and now of course, text messages and facebook. We stopped using email for basic communication about 10 years ago.
Primarily, it's because they want to talk when they're at work, in school, or on the go, but the vast majority of them can't afford a Blackberry.
I keep in contact with my friends mainly by texting, MMSes or LiveJournal. E-mail is used mostly for business. The only friends I e-mail, are my American ones (who for some reason can't text me back or can't handle MMSes) and I e-mail them from my phone.
Slashdot continues approving junk as newsworthy.
I can't give you an educated response because I'm texting my BFF Jill.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
Minitel.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
"I was writing an email on the PC, and it was, like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep-- and then, like, half of my email was gone. And I was, like- It devoured my email. It was a really good email. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of a bummer."
... until they have to send their first resumé and cover letter :)
:)
On a more serious note, I have just been sucked into the wonderful/scary world of Facebook, and I must say, wow. I knew people liked to reinvent the wheel all the time, but what's with this new thing of "writing" on each other's "wall" instead of just sending emails? What was wrong with emails in the first place? I mean, I can see the attraction of writing fun things on these "walls", but many go much beyond that and use it to organize meetings, leave their phone numbers, addresses, and whereabouts for the next 3 weeks, for the recipient, but also everyone else to see.
So either this generation does not realize what it's doing (basically posting their contact details while broadcasting their private lives on teh internets), or it doesn't care at all about that thing called privacy.
I haven't even reached 30, and I already feel like I'm getting old
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
As a business owner, I'm still having trouble getting documents via email instead of Fax. That tells you how much further we still need to go.
Over time I think these kids will learn that in the real world where you're trying to get work done, IM is annoying as hell. It's like having someone call you on the phone every few seconds. No thanks.
E-mail, web forums, and other "delayed" forms of communication are so much better for almost everything.
IM is really only a substitute for the phone. And then only when it makes sense, like to save money on long distance or when you need to be quiet.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Sometimes less is more, stop trying to fill your quota, it is embarrassing.
--- I do not moderate.
I think it's clear from most of these comments that email is dead. However, nobody has commented on the most dead combination you could possibly use: FreeBSD running an email server!! The horror!! Running a dead communications platform on a dead OS is one sure way to invoke armageddon.
rm -rf sig
I completely agree with this... I never use email *rolls eyes*
I can archive my e-mail discussions, save them to an mbox file and load them into most other mail applications. That's not possible with all that web-based stuff. With some IM programs exporting works, too, but it's hard or impossible to import those discussions elsewhere. Text messages as part of a cellphone - can you archive those? I never tried.
Anyway, I still have my first mail conversations from the mid 90s. Can't say the same thing for other forms of digital conversation.
stupid article.
its all text transported over between clients....
with their iphones and crack cocaine.
Three years ago in early high school I also thought email was worthless. However after I found the need to contact my teachers or do anything serious online, e-mail became vital. When instant messaging and social networking sites are kids' primary form of communication with their peers, they believe they don't need email. However, later in life, especially in the professional world, email is vital to communicate to others.
Forget them, the new way to communicate is IRC baby....
If knowing is half the battle, what is the other half?
Damn kids and your MTV and skip-bo's and spiralgraphs.
Once the grow up they will realize that not everything needs to be instantaneous short bursts of emoticons, and you really do want to send people actual coherent thoughts ( ie, "letters" ) at times.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19764563/
We used to dream of dynamically sizing arrays. We had to compile up different versions based on dataset sizes, and we liked it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You make fun of teen grammar, yet your own comprehension of the language is limited. The plural of 'medium' is 'media'.
Email is a P2P protocol that can survive the loss of service on a given provider.
Facebook is totally centralised and will disappear one day and take all the contents with it (as will myspace, twitter etc.)
Teenagers shallow and faddish. Details at 11.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Why do I read the "news" here? Seems they try to find all the mildly sensationalist stuff they can, and now the news. The logical fallacy is obvious but, just in case, the conclusion made is that if kids do X more than Y, then X will win and Y will die out. While that conclusion *can* be true, it isn't true on its own grounds. They could grow out of it. With kids, fads are embraced and discarded at a very high rate.
Still, I guess it's fun for moment to imagine a Corporate MySpace system. Even more fun to imagine it as the primary communications method with the email server turned off. I bet somebody would build a client so they could easily send and retrieve their MySpace postings.
Oh, and far as the mail is dying "given the annoyance of spam", gimme a break. Spam will migrate to any sufficiently used open communications medium. Hell, have you seen all the anti-spam tools bloggers have to use these days?
Nice job, Tom Hudson! Almost got me starting at a gaping asshole with that one!
I almost never use email as a way to communicate with my friends, and when I do, the emails resemble text messages more than email anyway. One the other hand, I use email as the primary way to communicate with my business associates.
I meant to say sending costs 10 cents and receiving costs 2 cents.
... when you can communicate with holographic representations of people, a la star wars.
I don't think that studies like this prove a lot... I live with a 28 year old who probably sends a thousand text messages a month, i personally cannot be bothered to try and key more than one or two words with a phone keypad, and I much prefer instant messaging or email. A lot of young people do nothing more than sit around chatting with their friends or whatnot, and this is just reflected in their use of the internet. Most people grow out of wanting to spend their whole lives socialising, and email is a nice unintrusive way of communication.
Just a few scattered thoughts on the matter
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov
I'm pretty sure this all comes back to the almighty buck.
:)
Remember that it effectively costs nothing to send an email, but I've yet to see an SMS messaging service with a pricing model I like. That isn't to say I don't use SMS, I just don't like it
With telcos buying up ISPs in droves, it's in their interests to keep kids off email and TXTing each other for as long as possible. As a side-effect, don't expect much progress from your ISP on the spam-battling front.
I think I'll stick with email for now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I can understand it. I grew up doing email, now email is my main communication medium, I am in my 40s, and you know what? I am shifting more and more towards IM myself. Why? Consider the following:
We as humans are not geared to multiprocessing and having a hundred open threads of communication. I want to talk or IM with someone, say what we want to say, then move on to other things with our full attention, without this lingering feeling that there is a zillion things we haven't really taken care of and we are leaving open.
If you are wondering, I might get only about 30/40 emails a day, and I may write only 20 or so, but still it's a chore. Young people communicate more, and I can fully understand why they prefer IM, so more similar to speech, so more natural, so more lightweight. I am going the same direction myself, and let me tell you, it feels liberating. I look forward to the day when all the communication with colleagues and friends is over IM, and email is relegated to that twice-a-week habit that is now for me physical mail.
At 10 cents per SMS for every one over I feel MY pain, deeply. A few other observations:
Teens don't use voicemail. At all. They neither pick up their own nor do they leave messages.
Teens rarely answer their phone except for people they actually want to speak to. Answering mom or dad only under duress or threat.
I keep AIM on
"Kid's Say the Darnedest Things."
Except there the kids were often right, and a heck of alot funnier.
I can only talk about my personal experience about all this. We kinda had everything all at once and realy fast around here: internet, cell phones and everything regarding it since mid early to mid 90's (major investiments on mobile phone and internet, because until then most cells phones I ever seen were in big cases and internet only heard about from friends that were in college.... BBS's until then :P).
As soon as SMS (short messaging system) was "discovered" all teens started to use it... why? Fast, _cheaper_ then phone calls, you could send them from anywhere if you had cell coverage, and you could send them in situations you didn't want or couldn't call the other person (classes, cinema, etc).
This was more then 10 years ago... since then IM started to appear. Social networks as well... I don't see social networks to exist for long... there will always be such services, but look at IRC and forums... Social networks is nothing more then a reincarnation of BBS's with a semi-personal, semi-public area (profile), with the possibility to share content. It's a neat forum with a more person approach instead of topics.
Getting back to text messaging and all that... Like I said, we had (and have) an huge usage of text messaging (cell text messaging, ergo SMS) but started to balance it self out as age comes. I for example started using email for work, study and so on because I either need to be formal or wanted something to be available on my computer after being sent.
All was balanced since it serves different purposes.
I see e-mail as the equivalent to have "something put on paper", like a letter. I only use email for informal stuff when the other person is unavailable in IM or sms (for example, is working, and pays more time to the computer then to his/her phone, so I know I'll catch them reading the email).
IM I use to chat with friends.. It's instantaneous, doesn't require much. Also use IM when I'm in a meeting and need to talk with someone, get some facts straight and quick (althou I sometimes get out of the room and call someone, but if I can prevent that, I do it with IM).
sms/text messaging I rarely use... used it everyday, several times an hour when I was younger (did I mention cheaper then calls? I did? So there you have it), now I just use when I can't get some one to answer me on the phone, or I just want to tell something but it's too late to call, or simply what I have to say isn't worth calling someone to tell it.
Social networks I really can't be bothered to use them anymore... some years back when they were something new, and everyone used it yeah I jumped on the wagon, but can't find anything useful on them except that I can find people I haven't seen for quite some time, ping them, get their number, email or whatever and resume our conversations from there (sharing photos and such is neat, but so is sending them to my email, with the bonus that I don't have to click and save everyone of them... everything else I can easly get from forums, oficial sites/forums/mailing lists, etc).
Saying that email is dead, well, it has been for quite some time where personal relationships is concerned (except for the occasional e-postcard, or the emails I send and receive from friends that are working and can't use IM or call me).
Earlier this year, I discussed this matter with a 16-year-old girl. She said she preferred IM (MSN) over SMTP, because any email account she used would quickly get overloaded with spam. Many of us have different ways of dealing with that problem, but her solution was simply to never use the same email account for too long if she had to use it, and preferably not to use it at all. I suspect that this is not the only reason why she and her friends don't like to use email, but by itself spam seems like a valid complaint.
Facebook and others have been irritating me for a while. Where as previously you had access to your friends arrangements, photos etc. over open protocols such as E-mail and real life, now ever increasing numbers of my friends are reluctant to arrange things over anything other than their chosen social networking sites.
This annexation of social space for commercial interest is a much bigger loss than any gain we get through the functionality gained through using these things. I for one am unwilling to sign up to sites that claim the right to investigate my life and license my works for 'free'. People follow the functionality offered, we need to find an open way of implementing the social networking facilities provided by these sites if we are to maintain our rights to privacy and truly enhance the way we communicate.
I could ramble, but let's keep it short and sweet.
This is pretty far down for a reply but I've got to post this...
My great grandmother passed down an old photograph book containing postcards she had received (we're talking circa 1900's) to my grandmother who, in turn, passed it to my mother who, in turn, was about to throw it in the garbage when I intercepted it (Being the family geek/tech/now digital archivist)
They were 1 cent postcards containing one or two sentence messages addressed from my grandmother and her sisters to family relations the next state over.
Or so I thought... the messages were your standard high-school girl talk along the lines of "I went out to the after-game dance with so and so last night, looking forward to seeing you this weekend." From the postcards it seemed like they saw each other every week. Not a big deal until you consider that transportation consisted of horse, buggy and train so no family was going to make a weekly journey by train unless they were rich (whoo-hoo!) Until I remembered that my family wasn't (D'oh!)
A little more research and I realized they weren't in different states, they were in neighboring towns (long since absorbed into greater cities), no phones were arount yet so I was looking at the early 20th century equivalent of...
text messaging.
And my great-grandmother, in her nostalgia, had collected all the messages they had received from her sisters and cousins and saved them in this album.
Kind of unfortunate that we won't be able to keep the same for our great grandkids (and thus omg! cnt w8 2cu 2nit @ cncrt! lol! will be lost to the centuries...)
Not until they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers!
Until then, Thunderbird is my choice.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
In Soviet Russia email says kid's dead.
Really, it's not that hard to figure out. Kids are using alternatives to email because spam had clogged the system for too damn long. Like everybody else, they don't want to waste time wading through junk either. They just want to keep in touch with their friends and that's it. Nothing new about it otherwise.
I wonder how much of this perception is due to teenagers primarily having access to e-mail by way of web-based mail services because they can get those independent of their parents and/or for free.
I mean, yeah you can POP or IMAP gmail and hotmail and their ilk if you want to download a mail client your parents could break into, then learn how to set it up and possibly even pay a $20 per month or year or whatever for the privilege. If you're -- *ugh* a *total* geek -- maybe you can get a shell account from the guy who used to run the local BBS.
Otherwise, kids won't have access to all the features of e-mail, and more importantly peers who regularly use e-mail until college. And even then, unless you learn how to set up a mail client or get Daddy or IT to do it for you you'll still have a cumbersome and less-than-full-featured experience of e-mail by using the university's webmail if they offer it.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
seriously, email just isn't fast enough to keep up with what kids want to say, not to mention that the ability to make jokes (however lame they may be) is greatly diminished with email compared to what you can do with IM. but i suspect eventually IM will cease to exists (as far as teens are concerned) perhaps within the next 20~35 years, probably do to cell phones (or some other social communication device that i have yet to even hear of) that are so small and always on/in your ear so that you can be in constant contact with whoever, it will (again) be faster and eventually cost will cease to be an issue for those who are in the upper/middle, trend setting/following classes...
but who knows, if something else comes up... but if you had asked me 10~12 years ago, how often i would be using email as i grew older, for me it was at the time the ultimate form of communication, especially for long distance.
-Yourmomisfasterthanabeowulfcluster
netcraft confirms it. email is dying
How did this POS article become worthy of the title, "News for Nerds?" C|Net doesn't provide news, reviews or insight. Its motto should be, "Advertising is Content!"
Is this what we have to look forward to when editors employed by Rupert Murdoch/News Corp. take over management and dictate policy for the Wall Street Journal?
Less importantly, who really cares what the kiddies think about communication except the people trying to live off the stream of money flowing from their parents' bank accounts, through their vacuous little heads and into someone else's receivables ledger?
Get Off My Lawn!
I'm filtering Zonk's articles out. How the flying fuck was this article supposed to be newsworthy? By Jove, what is he smoking? Or perhaps I can offer another theory. Slashdot has been here for some time now... suppose Zonk was still passable for young back then... right. That means he must be old now. Old and dementing.
In other words, kids won't talk to you unless you check a forum often enough that their message won't get lost in the clutter.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I'm a 24 year old in the restaurant business, and most of my friends are in the same field. I generally use text before phone calls, because text messaging doesn't require an immediate response. They can finish their task without having to answer in a certain time-frame (4 rings.)
If I have an urgent need that requires an immediate response, I'll call the person. I guess I use text much like email, but with the knowledge that the message will reach them wherever they may be. When someone creates hardware along the lines of a blackberry, without the steep cost (a $50 handset is a lot cheaper than a $500 one when you make a living waiting tables,) I'll probably switch back to email.
Building on your great joke:
plz use cvr sheet 4 tps, also need u @ ofc sat TBG
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
On the contrary, that is how a lot of high stakes business is done, on the golf course, at fancy restaurants, hotel suites,etc, the "good ole boy" network. And for formal ones, ponder the influence of just one fraternity, skull and bones, or say scroll and key. Those are social networks.
You just don't like kids and want a way to feel superior.
Nope, I am not a kid, most likely way older than you are, but I have always known about "social networks", because they work. People who start earlier with them build contacts that last a lifetime. Sure, it may be goofy in the beginning, but RTFA, these are teenagers already getting into business, and the only place they use email for the most part is talking to older folks, but their peer group is using IM, and that peer group will be the mainstream "business" community in a very short time frame. Time marches on friend, things change, but social networking is the best way to get ahead short of being born a billionaire.
What is the internet? A network of networks? The more presence you have networking-in all the forms-the better off you can be in business, it's all about timing and contacts. When I first started out working, the internet didn't exist, not at all. We didn't even do a lot of telephone shopping, it was dead trees catalogs and snail mail. Since when is even "email" mainstream? Oh, it happened in a fast time frame? Why yes it did. IM, or what IM evolves into, will be the same.
Don't become an old fogey before your time, it will make you chronically bitter.
Now, you can get off my lawn before I turn the sprinklers on....
That High School Musical is the best movie ever and Hillary Duff is such a talented actress... Since when does the general population care what they think?
Being able to write well formed prose may impress your clients now, but in 10 years once this generation has established itself in the business world, many of your potential clients might well be using text messages as their primary means of conducting business deals.
Your elaborate prose might just be filtered straight to the trash.
If you can't thumb out "dood i am so ur best choice lets talk 2:30 @ joes" in 10 seconds on your mobile, you might not get their contract.
Although you'll have to take that as an artist's rendition. I've never sent a text message. I'm still trying to figure out how to get a phone like my old one back, one that didn't have color, graphics, an integrated ring tone store, 3 layers of menus to get to my stored phone numbers, and didn't have the ability to receive text messages. I see them all the time in the news being sold as low cost phones in India and sub-saharan Africa; am I really that far behind the times?
And to hell with voice mail and a missed calls list. If I didn't get your call, I was busy. Call back if it's important to you. It obviously wasn't important enough to me to answer. Hello?
In other news, hormones are found to cause obtuse behaviour during the teens.
Email, usenet, irc, "social networks", instant message clients, cell phones.. these are just different means of telecommunication. Some more awkward than others.
Emails have been around since the first days of arpanet. It's proven and simple technology. What is instant messanging other than instant "email"? What is a blog other than a homepage with anonymous messages attached? "social network" merely means a blog with dozens of links to friends' blogs and a public billboard of posts between such friends to show off their friendship to whomever cares...
Not everyone enjoys all the other marvelous stuff going around "social networks". Sometimes, all you need is To: and Subject:
I don't feel like it...
Heck, I still use the paper post system all the time, because electronic mail is useless for physical delivery of packages. Of course.
Text messaging is for people who want real-time, but for whom clarity and deliberate content are not important. I must be old, because I find communications done in IM seem to have a rather light-weight ADD quality about them. --Which is probably appropriate for kids these days. --Keeping in mind, that the kids using computer communications are regular kids who are worried about clothes and popularity contests and who's dating who, etc. Light fluffy stuff. Email was developed by geeks for geeks, and because of its usefulness, was adopted by business, and I expect will remain in use that way for some time to come. (Try keeping 50 clients sorted in real-time!) Maybe when the ADD kids raised and trained in information sorting of that magnitude reach the business world, they will create a different type of work place and style of business management, but I don't see how they'll manage without something as stable as email. Attention to detail, record keeping and being able to take an hour or a few days to think about all the ramifications of a question before responding become important when you enter the business world.
(Although, given some of the communications I've done a back and forth on with various businesses might sometimes suggest otherwise.)
I see IM and today's social networks as having potential for something very useful in the future, but right now they still seem to be in a rather proto-gimik-time-wasting stage of development. When the business world finally adopts them, it will mean that their value has been proven, at which point the next New Hip Thing will be popular with the kids, and only old farts will spend time on Facebook. If we survive long enough as a culture, that is. . .
-FL
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I wont believe it until its confirmed by netcraft.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
kids don't exist in the same world as adults. who gives a fuck what they think is good and what is trash? a bunch of fags, that's who.
Try going to work and asking your boss to send you the prototype by sending it to "your myspace". The only people who use social networks as their primary means of internet communication are ignorant people (most teens fall into this category) and dumb asses.
In other news: according to the recent opinion poll published by the American Society of Macaroni Lovers, forks are to replace spoons in the next seven years.
could you imagine a mailing list run over IM? This is why "grown ups" aka people with enough life experience to have an opinion that matters use email.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Tell that to my boss who has a 8GB yes Billion, Outlook email file.
Teach em well n let em leed th wa
Show em ll th booty tha possess insyd
Giv em a senz of pryd 2 mak it easyr
Let th chilen's laffter remind uz how we uzd 2 b
Chorus:
Bcuz th graytst luv of ll
Is happz 2 me.....
I'm a little illiterate with my phonetic markdowns, feel free to correct me.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Don't use Facebook/MySpace!
Seriously, who gives a shit?
I'm 29 and I've been using email 10 years, many of you out there likely longer, it's simple it's easy and I don't need to log in to some damn social networking thing just to speak to my friends - plus my email is controlled by ME! (and El-guarto, trying to sell me cock pills!)
Who writes these stupid articles, who prints them, who submits these dopey stories and why am I responding to it!?!
Get off my lawn.
Different technologies have different uses. IM, text messaging, e-mail, etc have not killed phone calls. Why? Phone calls allow for you to hear someone's voice, which is useful and/or nice in a number of different situations. Likewise IM will not kill e-mail. IM is nice, and I have an IM client running pretty much all the time but it's more for contacting friends with quick tech questions, or BSing while I was for a slow lab install to finish. It would work for support, because IM expects a realtime response which I can't always give. E-mail works much better hence why we use it. Likewise, my parents, friends, etc often will e-mail me when I'm at work because they have something to say or want information, but realise that I may be busy and not able to immediately respond.
As for communicating on social network sites, this is just people playing around. E-mail has the same function, but is universally compatible. We are not going to go around telling everyone at work they have to sign up for myspace. Sure it may be fun to use when you are talking to friends who also have accounts, but it does not replace the universal access of e-mail.
You have to remember that they aren't talking about any new technology here. IM/text messaging have been around for a long time, and social network sites are doing nothing other than sending e-mails in a closed system.
For a technology to kill off another technology it more or less has to either be a better version or really change the way we live to the point we don't need the old technology. None of this is a better e-mail, hence e-mail is fine.
If I had to write out everything using SMS, it'd take 1000s of messages to communicate the equivalent of what I normally say in probably a couple hundred emails per month.
When I was a kid, kids passed notes on scraps of paper and wrote on the back of bus seats in jumbo marker. Now either the article's thesis hold true and they went on to replace the business communications of the day - telephone and snail mail - or the author has the universe arse-backwards and SMS and MySpace are the hastily scrawled love note and the graffitti'd toilet door of the 21st century..
My god. I could write an article about THAT!
the disadvantages of a telephone call and email. The hassle of entering text without the benefits of time-shifting.
Good point, and one that's been bugging me.
Disclaimer: I'm old (I started on punch cards in the 70's) and now am an executive at a huge company.
I have a blackberry, and I'm totally addicted. Hundreds a day, both directions. Real email (== Outlook at my company) I really only use for reading big attachments.
I text too, a bit, and despise it. The UI is stunningly bad. I almost couldn't design a worse one. Typing text messages takes forever. On my blackberry, on the other hand, I can type almost as fast as I can on a keyboard (a rate which is respectable but not fantastic).
Here's my question. So, how do kids do it? How can serious texters stand to type on phone keyboards, when every period, exclamation, etc. requires jumping into the Symbols menu? Or so I just have a bad phone? (Samsung Katana)
especially when there's no additional benefits.
What you're missing is that social network messaging solves THE problem that email has. You know who sent you the message. And barrier to spam is higher than with email.
Lots of other email-like functionality is missing, but the authentication issue (sender and receiver have authenticated themselves to a third party) has been fixed.
paintball
Kids need to shut the fuck up.
I was one of the early developers of email protocols and software. I agree that email, especially SMTP-based, is dying.
Spam is a huge factor in killing email. Email depends upon individuals having and maintaining well-known email addresses for extended periods of time (years or even decades). That's no longer viable in a world where old RFCs are scanned for email addresses to add to the mailing list for penis pill advertisements and 419 solicitations.
Email did not adapt successfully to the challenge, so the users adapted in its place.
The kids use IM and social networks. The suits use Blackberry and mandate enterprise-wide conversions from open-source/SMTP to Outlook/Exchange at an ever-growing number of organizations (including a few that will surprise you). Both of these are closed systems which lack email's "wild west" free-for-all.
For those of us who still use email, filters are a necessary evil. However, the rates of false negatives and false positives are both unacceptably high. False positives in particular wreak a devastating impact upon the reliablity of email. There is a need for a reliable communication mechanism that is not a burden in itself, and with each passing year email does a worse job in fufilling that need.
The same thing happened to netnews, which is further along in the dying process. At my organization (100K users) only about 60 people still use the NNTP server, and it's scheduled to be shut down.
Most developers in the SMTP (including POP3 and IMAP) and NNTP world have either bailed out, or are in the process of bailing out. Development of some applications has already ended. Others are in a flurry of development to get every last pending user suggestion in before development stops.
History shows that if you see escalating development activity in your favorite application, it's a sure sign it is about to be frozen forever. If you're lucky, the final version will be placed in an open source archive so some volunteer can take it over, but that won't stop the inevitable software rot.
IM, Blackberry, iPhone, etc. may not be the future of interpersonal communication; perhaps that future doesn't exist yet. However, email and netnews are the past.
Are we descending into Idiocracy? IM, SMS WTF? You want it now, pick up the damn phone. If email is too intellectually challenging, please do the gene pool a favor and donate yourself for Soylent Green processing.
The Dead Email You
Since when do we listen to kids anyway? They clearly know what they are talking about they are CEO's HA!
Pardon me for being suspicious (and not that it matters), but it look like you set up your own joke with an AC post so you could Karma whore. If so, it worked!
Is this a rhetorical question?
Facebook is frequently more reliable for communication among younger people. At work you can always send something to name@business.net, and you know that it will show up at the machine of the recipient who likely has an email client open constantly. Teenagers and college students tend to change email addresses more frequently; instead of having to maintain an updated contact list (which I'd have to somehow share between my different imap/webmail accounts), a Facebook message requires only a lookup by name from my friends list. Also, when your message recipients have a tendancy to hop around public terminals where they don't have email apps set up, it's good to be able to send to a web-accessible system which is checked most often, the Facebook.
Then what the heck is business going to do for a file server?
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Whats the difference between txt messaging and email? I dont think there really is one.
IMs generally don't get lost, eaten by asinine, poorly thought out and implemented spam "filters", aren't silently dropped after receiving an accepted code, don't suffer from arbitrary file size limits that were set back in 1994 and never updated to get with not even modern times, aren't killed off by rogue blackhole lists who arbitrarily added an IP on the word of some moron seven years ago and refuse to acknowledge that the IP has since gone through a dozen owners...
E-mail is crap.
Are you dealing with manic schizos at your job, that they continually spam your IM windows while you search for whatever it is (answer to a question, file, etc.) they IM'd you about?
I'm surprised no one has pointed out the fact that the same thing happed 3 years ago: In South Korea, email is for old people
That is all just, like so... Whatever..
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
The kids I know borrow an adult's email address to start these things. I've leant mine out to what I think are trustworthy kids for this purpose.
I blogged this a long time ago, but it still isn't acknowledged widely. Myspace filters its message boards and blogs. It is no email replacement for a lot of reasons, this certainly isn't even the biggest one.
Anyway, if you have a myspace account, try this experiment:
1) Make a new bulletin board post
2) Enter the text "Rupert Murdoch censors my posts" and submit.
3) Watch the post never show up in your bulletin board
Repeat the experiment with a control:
1) Make a new bulletin board post
2) Enter the text "Rup3r7 teh Murd0ch c3n50r5 my posts" and submit.
3) Watch this post show up in your bulletin board immediately
Yes, I know Myspace is a private website and they can filter whatever they want from their users. I won't call it outright censorship for that reason. I do feel that there is an expectation from users that Myspace can be used to discuss anything (well, anything legal) without a thought to having the conversation squashed, though. So it's kind of a grey area at best.
Slashdot does similar things in its comments. There are blacklisted words and whatnot. Slashdot is at least nice and tells you when you say something bad, so you can 'correct' it. Myspace simply says (in experiment 1) "Your message will appear on your bulletin board shortly" with no indication that the post was actually squashed. I deleted my myspace account quite some time ago in protest, whatever little good it does...
Reid
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Answer: predictive text. Get a phone with decent predictive text, learn to use it, and you'll never want to go back to hunt'n'pecking on those tiny little keyboards.
For a work phone I have an HTC 'smartphone' running Windows Mobile 5 (my god how it sucks) with a full slide-out querty keyboard, and for my personal phone a lovely little Nokia E65 with excellent predictive text. I can write messages at least twice as fast with the Nokia, and it only needs one hand to operate (which comes in handy for surreptitious messaging in boring meetings).
Predictive text takes about an hour or so to get used to, but once you've got the hang of it text messaging suddenly becomes useful and non-annoying. You're using a tiny fraction of the keypresses you'd use to tap out each word manually, and so the temptation to use moronic TXT SPK never arises.
[ digression ]
Having said that, even the nicer smartphones seem slower and less responsive than some of the old dumbphones - my old Nokia 8210 was the fastest phone I've every used for any given function, and basically everything the phone could do could be done in about 5 keypresses. The Nokia 6230i was a great phone and much fancier, but not as responsive. The E65 is very fancy indeed, but slower again.
[ end digression ]
Oh, and yes, you have a bad phone. Samsung make OK handsets in my experience, but their software is beyond awful. Stick to Nokia, Moto, Sony Ericsson. Do *not* get any model of Windows phone unless you are looking forward to having your mood constantly swing between suicidal and homicidal.
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
I shudder along with you, but I'd say if their job requires writing something, ask for a resume, and maybe have them write a letter about why they want to work at your company, what their goals are, etc.
In other words, have their first contact with you be via email. Bonus: You can probably write a script to reject the ones who can't spell "you" before it hits your inbox, though I wouldn't recommend it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
For example: We have tons of spam in our email already, so there are a number of filtering solutions already out there.
Also, email opens up a much bigger window with a much bigger area of blank text. I really, really hope that this continues to encourage people to be just a teensy bit more verbose than w/txt msgs bc ths hrts ur eyz anywhere you see it. At least if it's a "text message" on an actual phone, they have an excuse for that crap.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I am 23 and I hate Texting (or SMSing). I rather prefer calling. Because in asian region, most likely you can make a 1 minute call when you write 2 SMS (around 320 letters). So, what is the best way, explaining clearly on multiple text messages or make a call and flood words ?? Also I hate typing messages with a tiny 9-10 button keyboard.
I prefer e-mail as my main and official communication method. One good thing is, you can update people without annoying them. As in, if you Text, Call... other party's phone will make funny noises. And you have no fucking clue where the hell he/she is at, maybe in a busy meeting, lecture, other function. And most likely you are ruining other party's day. Also, its much more convenient to type e-mails with fully funtion 100+ button keyboard, aint it?
During my FYP, I never made a single call to my supervisor. Also I rarely had meetings with my supervisor. USually I write emails, and supervisor reply with comments. It was much convenient.
Other two benefits with email is, there will be enough time to think and write down clearly... also you can keep copies for future reference.
I am avid fan of IM, but only for casual chat with friends.. no business over IM...
Yes only businesses use emails extensively nowadays.
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Well, I'm 52, my girlfriend is 50, most of our friends range in age from 61 to 35, and all of us use email everyday for personal use.
Not a one us text messages.
We could give a crap what "kids" have to say until they are mature enough to have meaningful conversations with.
That's really wierd. I just blogged about this on my site 4 days ago. Maybe News.com journalists read my blog =) http://217.155.230.229/index.php/content/view/18/2 /
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
Being one of those non-trendy teenagers who still wears brown despite black is the new black, I came to the IM game quite late: I preferred email for communication with my friends purely for the reason I prefer phone calls to text messages: the intent is clear and the message often more detailed.
The only thing I really use IM for is IRC, and I prefer email for everything else, because there is a possibility that the response may well be legible and not abbreviation filled.
I also like the idea of a constant record of all my communications. Gmail is excellent in this regard.
IM is fine for quick question and idle banter, but for serious matters, email and phone are king.
kill all the fucking niggers
Social networks aren't about giving kids a voice or anything like that. Email, IM and VOIP do that just fine. They're about using kids to build content, that hooks other kids, and builds revenue streams.
The real question is whether these kids are learning that they need to keep their society free of business interests.
Kids have been saying that e-mail is "dead" for several years now, and it's no more true now that it was several years ago. This rubbish is not "news" in any sense of the word. Can we please bring some decent editorial control back to Slashdot?
Nothing to see here. Move along.
The ability to conduct the majority of one's communication using SMS, IM, or site-based messaging services speaks loads about how important that person is to listen to. I strongly prefer less frequent but substantial communcation to constant buzzing/beeping accompanied by endless vapidity.
I don't understand why it's so black and white, with people needing to use either texting or e-mailing.
The choice over texting/e-mailing depends on what's going on. Being in university, when I get a new lab partner, the first thing I do is get their e-mail address, add them to MSN, and then block them so it's easy to e-mail each other, but we can't "chat". If they have something to say about any results or the report, they can discuss it in an e-mail. Having an e-mail makes sure I have a record of everything without having to dig through chat logs, and I can easily forward it to another lab partner to keep them in the loop.
However, if I want to get a coffee with a friend who's in class or on their way to campus, I'll send a text to their phone. I'm not going to send an e-mail and wait an hour to see if they still want a coffee.
What idiots really read slashdot for it's crack induced tech prophecies. Teenage businessmen huh...yea... well perhaps when they grow up they'll expand their business model to all viable communication mediums. I've seen this before, each time a new way to socialize comes around some idiot predicts it will wipe out all other forms of communication. Soon the entire Dow Jones stock average will be run entirely through text messaging. Cmon people.. get a clue. The same thing happens every time a new 'chat' method is made popular. Did you guys forget when all businesses were going to switch over to doing business through IM. Some did, but all together not really that many companies are actually in need of communication with the extra bells and whistles of a social networking site or even IM.
Plus if your talking about truly profitable businesses eventually the realization HAS to made that you simply cannot leave the majority of your businesses data in such a vulnerable location. What if the site goes down and loses data, gets hit by some virus attack or simply bans you because they can therefore locking you out of your own business model. It's pretty stupid really. Especially when you consider most social networking sites are really just front ends to an in-site email system. They don't use email, but they use myspace mail right. WTF is the difference there ?
Like chat, using social networking for businesses needs has a place, but only for certain career types. Social sites are great if your business relies completely on making contacts and networking with people, such as a talent agent, or entertainer but if you are the average businessman who interacts with professionals a social networking site is more or less going to cut out a lot of potential clients AND those clients (the old people) are by far the wealthiest and most likely to invest into your business. Running a standard business through a social networking site would just be stupid, unsafe, and distracting. You can mine the social networking sites and have a presence there easily and without centering your business and being reliant on a few sites for all your business contacts.
It's a good place to start, but where is the realistic argument that makes it not worth conducting business through email. It's really just about EXACTLY the same as a social networking site's
in-house mail system or IM system just without the fancy interface and profiles so it really seems like a weak statement. I heard the apostrophe was dead also, (about 10 years ago) but damn if it ain't still a live and healthy.
Heard religion was dead also, I think we all know how thats working out. So, yea, get back to us when you learn to expand your business to any and all communication mediums as needed. Should we be questioning the method of communication or the content within it? I really don't think a lack of medium to communicate over is the real problem, but rather a lack of people who actually have something useful or original to say.
Social networking is today's trend, but in 5-10 years they'll just rebrand the whole chat/email/bbs system into a new catch phrase. Look at it, IM and profiles already existed forever ago, social networking really doesn't add much to that except the ability to customize your profile more ohh I can have video and sound on my profile so now it's a social networking site.
Ok well, why is it that I've been able to socially network using IM and profiles and profile searches, which just about re-creates the entire social networking experience, for years. Even ICQ had the capabilities to search for people by age, location, interests. Social networking sites are just front ends to IM and email.. face it. There is no secret power there. Most of these sites are pretty simplified as far as being a useful business tool. Google's apps and gmail is really more realistic to run a business from than a social networking site. I'd certainly trust google's business reputation over any social networking site AND google hasalready geared
This thread seems to be the appropriate place to mention this. I've been communicating with a girl via email, and things seemed to evolve fine; up to the moment she found my ICQ number and added me to her list.
At that point it was clear that the quality of the discussion points has decreased, because I can't concentrate on responses as I could in the case of emails; and most dialogues are real-time so I cannot pick a more convenient moment to think about what I want to say. AAhhh... there are many drawbacks, especially when there is a significant delta between ages and occupations (ex: having a full time job makes it pretty difficult to keep the "IM'ing" tempo of someone who is back from classes at 15:00 and has nothing else to do for the whole day).
What used to be a social connection with a bright perspective (i.e. I managed to reveal many things about her personality and find out what makes her different from other persons) is now a 'yet another IM contact' which tends to become boring. I remember the earlier days, when I was thinking how I would allocate 2 hours at night for an email, and how I was impatiently waiting for her responses. That's gone now.
My point is that IM is much less likely to allow us reveal the partner's special features. IM is superficial. Now I am absolutely sure that if we were using IM since day one, I'd never tell she is in any way better than any random person out there.
Now, my question is - has anyone been in a similar situation, and how you have dealt with it. My current plan is simple - tell her about it and attempt to switch to real life meetings.
When I was a kid, when ICQ was new, all of us used ICQ or (later) AIM to communicate anyway. None of us used email to strike up conversations and organize stuff, because we needed that spur-of-the-moment realtime interaction that augmented calling the person up on the phone.
IM supplanted the phone because not everyone had cell phones at the time, and calling the person up would interrupt the rest of the family unless they had a private line. More than likely they were tying up the one phone line for the internet anyway.
So, IM gained rapid acceptance.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
My company blocks all IM. Similarly, all of the government agencies I have worked for have blocked it. Some will go out of their way to provide their own IM service in-house to allow employees to collaborate, but it is little used.
Also, cell phones are banned in the workplace for any secure government facility you may work at, PDAs too. Some allow laptops with a special letter of authorization, but then they won't let you connect them to anything...like a network, a phone line, anything useful.
What's left? The PC they give you, the e-mail client they give you, and the web.
E-mail is dead? Hah! Be prepared when you get a job, kid. Can't stand not to IM in the workplace?! Don't try applying for any DoD job or for any major corporation that gives a damn about IT security on the Internet.
What do I use? I've stuck to using web mail. I can still access it from any site I work at. Whether it be a "downtown" government site, my company's site, a friend's house or home, I always have access to my e-mail. Where do I have access to my IM account? Only on the one PC I have at home that I could install the app on. My company allows me to install software on my Internet PC, but they block the IM ports. All of the government sites I work at do not allow me to install anything on their PCs. Also, my cell phone is banned in those workplaces as well.
Sincerely,
Think Differently
kids say email is dead... adults who operate biz say we need better email...
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
No, actually I didn't. It really is just that easy to make a "Zork dupes articles" joke almost every day on /.. Also, can't karma whore for funny anyway. It doesn't increase karma anymore, and hasn't in a long time.
The Farewell Tour II
You'll have to excuse me if I don't take the opinions of a few ignorant teenagers as some kind of prophetic gospel.
I think The Boondocks summed it up pretty well: http://youtube.com/watch?v=rf5fQ8Q2_Xw
Who listen to kids anyway....next big step in evolution will be to lose two fingers, the lack of written language and the mouth will seal itself.
I would not be so proud as to advertise that i text a thousand messages a month in a less than bad english or any other language for that matter.
Like it has been posted on slashdot, the next big thing is morse code, so text messaging is sooooo out
Email versus Messaging: really the same thing, only the second (as it applies to something like MySpace) is all inclusive and kept within the boundaries of it's application. It's still essentially "email."
As computers become faster and faster, who knows what we'll see. Maybe more video mail.
Seriously, who gives a rats arse what some 15 or 16 year old school kid with a cell phone and a myspace page fricken thinks. They are IRRELEVANT on the whole. When they get to college and beyond they will discover that communication needs to be effective, precise, direct, and easy to access... that's EMAIL. Sure, they will still fumble thumb their way through some OMG Hi2U bullshit texting to their friends, but on the whole they will find that it is neither available nor usefull in the real world for just about everything else other than fingering out who they are going to dry hump that night after work or class.
If teenagers want to live in the real world and communicate with other people, they'll stop changing their phone number and e-mail address every 15 mins. I personally don't have time for that shit -- if I send you mail and it bounces, it bounces. Not my problem.
I was a teenager rather recently and even I knew this shit.
Is it just me, or is messaging in a social network not that much different than e-mail with an address book that the social network site manages for you? We're not talking a huge difference from e-mail here (other than less unsolicited spam). I'm not sure this means e-mail is dead - more that it's evolving. Quite honestly, if SMTP-based mail dies and an alternative with less annoyances (spam) pops up, great. But it's still just e-mail with a different protocol underneath...
Gosh, I just bet you were Mr. Popular!
im in ur
All those old people in Korea, now they're dead. :-(
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
Isn't it amazing how new technology has enabled people to communicate in a similar way as in the early days of human speech, only over a larger distance and by having to pay for it? True, with SMS/text you can 'talk' with someone hundreds of miles away, but it's slow compared to speech, inefficient (is there any way to do some kind of 'broadcast' with SMS anyway, except for going through your address book or hoping that your friends will pass on the message?), limited, prone to misinterpretation (due to all those abbreviation 'dialects') and very volatile. That's all great for kids and cellphone operators, but I don't see anyone communicating about a project, financial stuff, organization of an event, ... over text messages.
I think this might be a reason why social networking (at least myspace, i don't know about facebook or others) sites are so popular. They (on a certain level) address both of these points. I can keep my email address the same, while changing the appearance/name on my myspace account. If someone wants to find me, they can search by my real name, but the page might look different when they find it, depending on when they come across it.
Email, as a communication medium for the masses, was dead in the womb. The real problem with email (aside from the spam issues and volume) is that no one (well few people) reads past the first 2 sentences.
This, more than any technical or adoption problem, has killed email as an effective way to communicate. It's why real time chat is so effective. You type one thought and wait for a response.
If you spend the time to write an email that has all the pertinent information in it, you almost always get a response back that indicates that the person didn't even read it. At most they scanned the first paragraph. Same for forum posts. They have the same issue. Our entire society has ADD, the most popular communications (being chat programs) reinforce this conclusion. Communication needs to be in bite sized chunks or it just doesn't get digested...
-AC
MKAYTHXBYE
Nothing will replace email for me unless it is searchable. When you're trying to dig up details that are buried under a year of facebook junk, or long since deleted from your cell, it's nice to not have to resort to asking for them again.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
disasm@slcs:~$ ps aux|grep postfix /usr/lib/postfix/master
root 4913 0.0 0.1 19552 856 ? Ss Jun30 0:13
postfix 4919 0.0 0.2 20624 1064 ? S Jun30 0:03 qmgr -l -t fifo -u -c
postfix 4920 0.0 0.2 21804 1232 ? S Jun30 0:01 tlsmgr -l -t unix -u
postfix 30538 0.0 0.3 20584 2016 ? S 14:34 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u -c
disasm@slcs:~$
Looks alive to me...
Sam
I just don't understand the whole text messaging thing over a cell phone. I mean, isn't it easier, cheaper and much less complicated to dial the number and talk to the other person?
I can't see text messages, facebook, myspace, etc. replacing email. First of all, email is still the most practical means for communication within a corporation. Some form of email communication will probably always be a requirement for formal business communication. Imagine your company setting up a facebook group and communicating that way. :P
That brings up the other problem with other forms of communication. The very reason email is fraught with spam is what will prevent it from being replaced: it is universal. You can only communicate with someone through facebook if you have a facebook account, etc. That eliminates any social networking tool from providing a replacement for email. Text messaging could possibly replace email as a form of informal communication, but email also provides other facilities, such as email groups, that text messaging doesn't yet provide.
And then there are the purists like me who will refuse to succumb to short, grammar-defying text messages. I have actually received emails that said things like, "I'm intrstd n that job!!!" and other disturbing, unintelligible vomit.
You can just set up a temporary email address with dodgeit or mailinator, or better yet, an "official" one with yahoo or hotmail. Set up for yahoo or something is under 5 minutes. Register to myspace with that email address and then go about setting up your myspace and conveniently forget you ever needed an email address to set it up. In four months yahoo will delete the address and by then you will probably have forgotten the password as well.
Bingo, I have a myspace, but no email address. It's that freaking simple.
Now explain to me why people look at me funny when I tell them I have no email address. It's like that scene from Idiocracy. They go huddle against the wall screaming "unscannable!!"...err, I mean "unemailable!!" but it's the same tone and everything.
What do they know! ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
15 years ago I saw a kid on the news say pog (remember pog?) was cooler than Nintendo. Now no one remembers pog but Nintendo is still doing well. Kids think the world revolves around them and if they don't like it than it's dead. They have a lack of understanding of what the real world is all about.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Their email function is widely used by young and old people, is just that is so normal that you don't note this...
ghostbar page.