[Sigia-l] Is email dead, too?

[Ziya Oz]

Andrew Boyd:

> I would say that the use of email is changing

Would it be fair to say that rather than the use of email changing,
available platforms for messaging is growing?

Email is an asynchronous one-to-one or one-to-many messaging platform. It
has always missed certain capabilities: speed, guaranteed delivery, privacy,
recallability, etc. While some platforms provide this, they do it at the
expense of ubiquity, which is email's universal and unrivalled appeal.

When you index the success of a message delivery network to downloading of
desktop software (like AIR for Pownce) or a walled-garden where data goes in
but won't come out (like Facebook) you take a much greater risk. (I don't
want to say AOL, but you're free to think along those lines. :-)

Also at some point the definition of what an email is may change (welcome to
SIGIA-L :-). For example, if Apple were to endow Mail with presence info of
your buddy list (like iChat) with a slight tweak of its UI for threading,
would that still be considered 'pure' email? Same on the iPhone?

Remember, a decade ago people were convinced push
news/email/alerts/broadcasts would kill other platforms. Just months ago
people had declared MySpace pretty much invincible, now even Murdoch is
saying that everyone's going to Facebook. Tech and mainstream media which
put Second Life on a pedestal not too long ago are now having distinct
Second Thoughts on yesteryear's phenomenon.

It isn't just the hot and muggy weather we're having in NYC that makes me
feel a tad jaded about this. :-)

----
Ziya

Design is the art of not inventing.