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What Would a Post-Email World Look Like?
jfruh writes "Pundits have been gleefully predicting the death of email for years, but nobody has really been able to explain what will replace email, especially for the medium's archiving capabilities that businesses and governments have come to rely on. It's possible that email won't vanish, but rather become invisible, one component of an integrated communication stream that will be transparent to users but still present — and useful — under the hood. It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time."
My email has been 'a conversation' since the I first used it in the early 90's. Maybe with some of the more crippled web based services people are now suffering with it's not so obvious. Stuff like Gmail feels like a step back from the threaded clients I've used for all that time, too much missing or poorly implemented.
When people ask whether email is going away I'm completely dumbfounded. It ain't broke and IMHO works better than the alternatives where absolute, instant response isn't needed. Mostly it's not noticeably slower anyway. When I desperately need a little more speed IM does a good imitation of a very poorly featured email exchange.