more on the "e-mail dying" meme

There appears to be a bit more content of late in the "e-mail is dying" meme.* Probably this is driven by the Google Wage phenomena which purports to be e-mail as if had been invented today rather than last century. A shift from e-mail being yesterday to other communication tools--Facebook, Twitter and Wave, foremost--is said to be catalyzed by the always on capability of the Internet and handheld devices. The argument goes that the asynchronous nature of e-mail is now outdated, an artifact of a time when the desktop reigned as the hub of our electronic world. Today the desktop is more of a periphery, with the handheld becoming the personal communication device that we live with 24/7. My own BlackBerry barely leaves my body. It charges each night on my nightstand (in the new BlackBerry "bedside" mode). These always on and attached-to-the-body devices allow instant response. As declared in a WSJ article titled Why Email No Longer Rules, "Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging?"

But this whole "e-mail is dying" argument misses the point that you don't always want "instant" and even with 24/7 attached devices, can't always have it. Ever tried instant oatmeal? Icch! Ever been slapped for e-mailing in a meeting? Ever tried to say something comprehensive on Twitter?

The point is that the "e-mail is dying" meme is just silly. What's of course happening is that modes of communication are proliferating and some of them displace e-mail in certain circumstances. Despite Facebook, Twitter and Wave, e-mail will be with us for a very long time.

And there's still lots of room for innovation around e-mail. GMail is of course the best current example. Whenever I go back to using e-mail on Outlook, I do indeed feel like I'm in the last century. The product is slow. It crashes on me frequently, probably because I've got a few add-ons (Salesforce, Linkedin, Skype). It uses an old database form, allowing messages to be in only one place at a time via folders instead of infinite places via tags. Threading doesn't include outgoing conversations. Search is abysmal. When I use GMail, it's a joy. Spam is mostly killed before it comes to me, thanks to Google's servers. Conversations are threaded beautifully. The product gets continual tweaks, many of which I can toggle on and off via the "labs" function and all of which work perfectly, with no effect on performance. And there's even a great GMail app for my BlackBerry, though it doesn't offer the instant "push" of normal BlackBerry e-mail. I have to wait for it. But when I do, I can search for any e-mail in my database, I get to see conversations threaded, and the product just works. And I can take a few breaths before I have to respond. Someday, perhaps, the forced asychonysity of e-mail will be appreciated again for what it is after all the hyped up alternatives begin to taste like too much cotton candy.

* David Strom (LINK) and Jessica Vascellaro in the WSJ (LINK) on the "e-mail is dead" meme. And Farhad Manjoo on Slate has a nice little takedown of Wave (LINK).