Biz Poll: Email

I’ve noticed that I don’t use email as much as I used to. On Wednesday we started a poll asking readers now that Facebook and Twitter are available, do you use less email to communicate?

20 percent said less, 7 percent said they used it more and 73 percent said they didn’t notice a difference.

Well, The Wall Street Journal is declaring email dead! In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold–services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world.

And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate–in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet–logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts.

Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so.

Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Continue Reading: “Email No Longer Rules…”

Photo by rannay.

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