A friend of mine told me about an article he read talking about how the youth of today aren’t using email, but using mobile phones for text messaging instead. He was pondering if I thought that email could be dying out.
I say no. In fact, I see an even bigger role for email as social networks expand.
Here’s some of what I wrote back:
Oh, and some of my friends in my network aren’t on any of those places (read: my dad). Oh, hi dad.
So how am I going to tie my network together? My inbox. It’s been our social netowking hub since the early days of the interwebs and I think we’re going to go back to it even more. It’s the one place that I can get a notification from every service I’m a part of and notifications from people not in those social networks. It’s the hub for communicating and notification. Just about every social network, including blogs, can send email to my specified account.
Sure we can use SMS or blogs or Facebook or others as our hub, but that limits the network. And some people don’t have a hub. They just manage everything in other ways.
So if the inbox is the hub, then the real trick is keeping it organized by filtering out spam, sorting email by topic and response, and keeping the inbox clean.
