The interesting question is not whether emailing is dead – the answer being no - but if it has any hope of surviving, or better adapting, to new generations. T

The interesting question is not whether emailing is dead – the answer being no - but if it has any hope of surviving, or better adapting, to new generations. There are two immediate hurdles: Email marketing has ruined email. And I don't mean just spam. I mean whatever unsolicited shit you sent me because you're abusing the address I gave you. The signal:noise ratio is almost perfect on a social network. My email box is a daily exercise in frustration. There is also the desired automated emails, trudging though them is an issue, less of one, but they can be noise depending on what you're using your email for. Directory services. If I want to contact someone at work, I alt-tab, ctrl-n type FLastname ctrl-k. Its a ridiculously lightweight action. At home, if I don't know someones email address looking it up involves stopping at a couple social networks, logging into Outlook Web Access if we happen to have some other organization in common, but thats probably not the address I actually want to send to. And after all that I can still turn up empty handed. The best case scenario is that they have their email address viewable in facebook, I bring them up on my droid (where facebook populates my contact list), start a draft email from the droid that I can then open up on my computer. Thats a pretty shitty best case. Going forward, the best way for email to adapt (and a thing I've wanted to see for quite a while) is for a social network to embrace their person organization and relationship management and become a directory service. Essentially, when I type "Alice" into the TO box in gmail, thunderbird, outlook, cellphone sms, my aim client, anything, why isn't her address automatically populated if I know her on service X? Right now social networks want to create yet another communication channel rather than just giving us a way to manage the ones we have. Think of a social network that was designed to just to trade contact information, let say vCards. I friend Alice and Bob on vCardBook, and suddenly I have a vCardBook LDAP server I can throw at my email client to have Alice and Bob's addresses at the ready.