John McKinley, former President of AOL Digital Services, CTO of AOL, and CTO of Merrill Lynch, asks in his blog whether email as we know it will be dead in five years. Yet, I don't buy it. I still have a black telephone on my desk. It may become VOIP or wireless one day. But, right now it is plain old telephone service. And, I depend on it. I think the same will be true about email.
John, supports his argument by citing the many examples of attacks on email:
- Twitter/short-form blogging
- Asynchronous messaging in social networks (e.g., the Facebook Wall)
- IM experiences now supporting queuing of messages to offline buddies
- Away message/Status message utilization in instant messaging
- SMS adoption (late to come to the US, but now pervasive)
- Wikis and other new collaboration platforms
- Comments (MySpace comments, Blog comments, et al)
- Casual communication forms (the nudge, the wink)
- New sharing experiences (Flickr, et al)
- Email aggregators (e.g., I use Gmail to aggregate all of my AOL, Yahoo, and POP3 accounts. These other companies still bear all the cost of hosting my email accounts, but now get none of the pageviews.)
- Email and IM integration into social networks (the new entrant risk).
I agree that email will change over time. There will be more efficient content monitoring and prioritization. Maybe the spam problem will be licked. It will also learn from the items John mentioned for new features.
But, email was evolutionary and based on a proven model -- namely the post office. It traces its history back to 1516, when Henry VIII established a "Master of the Posts". The Royal Mail service was first made available to the public by Charles I on July 31, 1635. (Wikipedia)
So, new technology will incorporate new features. But, email is here to stay.
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