I tend to blink a few times upon receiving a handwritten letter, but there’s an increasing realization that really young people – and I’m only in my 20s – might have the same reaction to an email.
With social networks like Facebook and MySpace providing messaging options, youngsters have been given one alternative; in the UK, it seems they’ve already taken advantage of it.
Various surveys, including a new one from AOL, also indicate that mobile instant messaging is growing in popularity. To again turn to the UK, a report found that around 1.2 billion text messages are sent in that region every week.
Then there are services like Twittr, where communication falls somewhere between the complexity levels offered by a traditional social network and a text message. Add something like AIM to the mix, and email looks decidedly slow and outnumbered.
Chad Lorenz gave the issue quite a bit of thought, however, and concluded, “It’s not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you’ll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post – or sending all of them at once – and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived.”
In fact, since Lorenz posted that idea, Google and at least a dozen startups have probably started working on it.
