aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Email’s not going away. Again.

Yesterday Fred Wilson declared email dead and blamed AOL:

Email is for old farts. And [kids] wonder why we use it.

And I blame AOL for that. Not that I think it’s a big deal. They get by just fine with other messaging systems, maybe better than I do with email.

But I am sure that AOL is the reason they don’t use email and never will.

Then today - as I was authoring this post - buzztracker Techmeme linked to his post. Fred is hot! But me, I’m disappointed in him. And not just because his email-is-for-old-farts declaration came on my 52nd birthday! Rather, it’s because I expected better of him.

I buy into Ray Kurzweil’s observations on paradigm shifts, “New communications paradigms...don’t eclipse old paradigms.” TV didn’t kill radio and movies didn’t kill theater and the Internet won’t kill newspapers and IM won’t kill email:

To hear people saying that we’re striving toward real time communications, I think that’s only half true. Many real-time communications [technologies] like the telephone evolved the store and forward capability later, because only half of the people are interested. The person placing the call wants to talk now; the person receiving the call tries to decide is this a good time or should it roll to voicemail…

I think that every communications channel really needs both a real-time and a store and forwarded component and each one grows the other. Email is store and forward and IM is real-time. Why are those two different industries? I think that’s a temporary situation.

That’s Technorati’s Dave Sifry last year at Supernova 2005. That still makes sense to me:

There are times that you want to have access to your mother right now and other times when the last person on earth you want to have access to you right now is your mother!

IM will unquestionably grow because we clutter email with what should better be instant messages. We’ll learn. But email is here to stay.