The nature of email is certainly shifting towards business dealings, as this article states. However, it's more than that: traditional email is also becoming a

The nature of email is certainly shifting towards business dealings, as this article states. However, it's more than that: traditional email is also becoming a message aggregator. As social utilities, such as Facebook, MySpace, etc continue to utilize their own messaging systems, email acts as a feed reader to notify you when you have a message in any of your more specialized systems. So rather than it being the message itself, it becomes the messenger of a message.