It occurred to me last week - when I received the first personal email in over a month that all of my personal communication was happening via my mobile phone, work email (Not too much!) and Facebook.
In fact, I haven’t written a personal email from my Hotmail account in over 6 month. Maybe I’m late catching on to this idea - I’ve read the articles and reviews on the following subject: the demographic of users of Facebook and MySpace, how Facebook is going to pass out Myspace by September, the duration of time users are spending on social networking sites, the effect these sites are having on the English language in general etc etc…
But personal email is being killed - mine only fills up with notifications from Bebo, Facebook, Linked-In and various subscription marketing newsletters.
So why have a personal email anymore? I’m already being marketed to on Facebook…
The irony is, the main reason why I need a personal email address is to sign up for a Facebook account - but if the personal email is becoming redundant - why are they mandatory for registration. Why are Facebook and Myspace insisting on emails at registration? They can market to users in their own space. Why isn’t a mobile number sufficient? Or personal data
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying, it’s the death of email in general. I still use my work one all the time - and couldn’t work without email - but for me it’s only a matter of time before I have a work network to communicate with my clients and suppliers on - reducing the dependency on email. I realise we have the web factory - but I’m thinking along the lines of a professional network - rather than social network.
I’d love to know other people’s views on this? Do other people still use their Hotmail, Google mail or whatever personal email client they have anymore?
Think LinkedIn just opened up the backend to developers as per facebook - so soon I finally get a work/corp network where I don’t need to worry about clients seeing that I just joined Zombies or that “Matt is having yet another cup of tea”…
Trouble is…FB is like crack cocaine right now…we’re all in there ALL the time…maybe once the clients are in there as well…the corp email starts to die too…
Right….back to Zombies….
I think the problem with e-mails comes from various sources:
- Most people don’t have a single e-mail account - most of us actually use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and our work e-mail for various purposes, mainly because some online services require a specific e-mail account (Blogger - Gmail, Live Messenger - Hotmail; Yahoo Answers - Yahoo, etc…). This leads to the mass creation of empty, non-used e-mail accounts that just create confusion for the users.
- E-Mail says nothing about you. It is a non-dinamic (so to speak) source of information. While in Facebook the communication is easy and almost in realtime, as well as multi-formated (you can have a lot of information about yourself, unlike the e-mail that is just an address), the e-mail is just what it is - an address that you might find written in a bathroom wall and that could belong to just about anyone.
- There is a general sense of insecurity that is already associated to e-mails - Spam, Trojans, etc… - that create a distrust in the system. Of course MySpace has already fallen in the same category (those beautiful comments that advertise Viagra always look good on your profile, don’t they!)
But, e-mails are still good for one thing - Newletter Subscription, as well as professional communication. That’s about the only thing I use e-mails nowadays, to talk to clients (who, like Matt said, don’t need to see that picture of me puking in the last Christmas Office Party) and to receive the Newsletters that I subscribe to. So, I still think e-mails are useful and they will continue to be for some time.
Remplacing e-mail by facebook (or similar service) ??
E-mail (personnal or professional) will never die, he will just evolve, become more and more mobile and versatile, as do the use of virtual communication by everyone.
My personnal e-mail adress is my passport for almost 90 % of my digital life :
- login to Web services
- Username for several IM platform
- Recipient for numerous Informations sources I follow by RSS, using the fine tuned Xfruits services, in that occasion the combinaison of Agregator RSS and RSS to mail, giving me the hability to keep daily or weekly archive of these infos… and what’s better than my Gmail account search engine to find back the past infos ;)
- show my personnality, as I customised it to speak for me : ch @ rles . fr
- use it to post or participate on several web platforms and services I use and/or own to publish my digital life.
About Facebook, I really do feel like it’s gonna burn its “hype effect” faster than myspace, as in less than 9 months after I get mine (sweet september 2006 ;op), the service allready becoming a joke that might, at the end, become your digital (and personnal) identity nightmare.
Just a little follow up to Mark’s commentary on email.
http://news.com.com/Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead/2009-1032_3-6197242.html
It seems the kids are with you Mark.
I think that email will evolve rather than die - but it’s clear that a personal email address is and will continue to become primarily an online Passport rather than a form of personal communication.
That then begs the question - should there be some sort of central/non-profit/government run online passport ID.
Something like this would help keep under 18s off Alcohol sites - but even more - it could help protect underage/venerable internet users.