So the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Email is dead today.  Wow!  While I certainly appreciate their sentiment that instant messaging services like Twitter and Facebook are better suited to the real-time web, I believe that email still has its place.  Read their article and then we will discuss…

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Wall Street Journal:  Why Email No Longer Rules…

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

 

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

I think that email still has some life in it.  Here is why:

  • It can be archived. I still have not figured out how to back-up my Twitter messages let alone archive them.  I do know how to save my emails forever.
  • It easily handles attachments.  If it is not a picture, I don’t think that Twitter can handle it.
  • It is universal.  EVERYONE has an email address.  There are only about 40 million Twitter users.  That is not nearly enough to make it a replacement.
  • It can be signed.  Digital signatures attached to emails make them as legally binding as real letters.  Twitter has nothing like this for authentication yet.
  • It is enterprise ready.  There are a ton of services, programs, and plug-ins to make email work in the workplace.  I can automatically extract appointment data, contact information, and tasks from email.  I cannot do any of that within the confines of 140 characters.
  • It is extendable.  What I mean is that, since it is not limited to only 140 characters in length, I can email a book, note, task, invite, or letter easily without abbreviation or editing.  That is not the case with Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong… I love Twitter, but I think that it may be premature to say that it is ready to replace email!

Is email dead?  Is it passé?  Do you use Twitter in the place of email these days?  Please share with us.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for October 13, 2009.

Image Credit: carolinian.org

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