The reason for mailing lists falling into disuse seems to me quite simple – mailing lists were invented back in the DARPA days. When they hit the public street with the popularisation of the Internet in say late 90′s they were taken up by communities that needed them because *there* *was* *nothing* *else*. They were the *only* tool available to the non-geek or slightly-geek at the time for communicating with a community. They were less than a perfect fit to the needs of those communities but they did the job and were useable (just about!). Suddenly I could communicate much more with my cycle-campaigning group and elephants-foot-sock-knitters could discuss the merits of a particular kind of purl stitch for the big toe. At that time even web sites were a broadcast medium – they were one way. Apart from IRC, which really was limited to geeks because you had to know about commands and terminals and things, it was the only choice.

Now there are tools better suited to use by communities such as used the lists and in fact by everyone from 2 to 102 (well we’re nearly there ;-) ) and that usage has moved off email. The geeks have also gone because its not interesting any more in the way it was when only geeks used it. Its real uses, such as Stephen has outlined, remain.

Things are becoming more differentiated, each tool being used for its best characteristics as those characteristics become clearer. At the same time, the take-up becomes ever wider. This is ongoing, its nowhere near finished. However, for me at least, email is here to stay. There are *some* conversations I’m *never* going to want to use any more connected medium for simply because some conversations are closer than others and for some there is a *need* for a “distant” mechanism.

What I find to be fun is that in some relationships I have several communication mechanisms available and I don’t always remember which one I’m having a particular conversation on. I might have a conversation that starts on email, continues hours later on the phone then finishes on facebook or skype – depending on the context available at the time. Others, say with my ex-wife might be constrained to email and phone. As I see it its all about relationships that we maintain and different ones impose different constraints on the communication mechanism. A CEO may well be in a position to mandate the technological mode of internal conversations in an organisation. In other circumstances it might be the context or the quality of the relationship that determines the mode. Its great that we have much better tools and much more flexibility to choose an appropriate mode for a conversation. But for me at least, some conversations will *always* be confined to email because I prefer not to give the other party more access than email provides.

What *is* disappointing is what spam has done to email. If email has a attempted-murderer that nearly killed it then spam has to be a prime suspect. I am of the firm opinion that were email being designed now, we wouldn’t do it the way it was done. I remember a paper I saw presented (can’t find it now) on an experimental “pull” system for email where the receiver would pull mails from senders with an algorithm resembling two-phase-commit/semaphore handling for initial unsolicited contact – a little like pulling rss as we do but with a way to get from new sources. Had that been the mechanism adopted ….. but of course spam wasn’t thought of when email grew (“designed” wouldn’t be the right word). Betamax and VHS again.

Long term, communication technologies that survive will be those that meet the needs of people. I don’t believe in anything new under the sun in that arena – human evolution is slower than ICT evolution.

Note that for several years I have been arguing for greater use of instant messaging for internal use so I don’t see a backlog of trivial messages when I return from holiday or time away. Something like Yammer could provide value, I feel.

BTW feel free to receive notifications of follow-up comments via email, as email is fine as an alerting tool. But just don’t have the discussion on email!

All the best

Brian

Note that I agree with you that it can be valuable to reflect on one’s own personal usage patterns. It was after looking at my use of a number of mailing lists which helped me to spot that use was dropping and an increasing proportion of posts were announcements used to promote events, advertise jobs, etc. rather than promote collaboration and discussion. As a result of my analysis of a number of lists I subsequently decided to leave several of the lists. In addition, inspired by a post on My information consumption habits or how having a smartphone changed the way I work by Aaron Tay a year ago I installed Xobni in order to give me a better understanding of how I use email. However after a few month’s usage I got a new PC and moved from MS Outlook to Thunderbird and as the applications only works with Outlook and GMail, was unable to have an objective picture of my email usage patterns.

It is interesting to think about how you and I communicate. We’ve met a couple of times but I don’t believe we’ve ever exchanged email messages – rather we’ve commented on each others blogs.

You have identified a number of use cases for email which we both continue to use – notifications of changes from social web services. This might include new people following us, requests for connection, information about new content, etc. Interestingly we tend to find that such notifications are configurable and typically will disable them if the volume is too great (e.g. when new people follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our blog, etc.) Like you I also find significant numbers of experienced users who have an email subscription to my blog. So email for alerts is still very important for both of use.

In addition I feel that email will continue to be important for small-scale personal communications, including both personal and professional uses. However I think we will continue to see changing use patterns for email, perhaps with younger people who haven’t been brought up in an email environment being more willing to use other alternatives. Perhaps, indeed, email is an example of a tool which is little used by the Google generation and digital natives, with use not being split across the residents vs visitors divide.

I was highly amused by the Atos coverage. Apparently their staff “waste too much time reading e-mail” so they’re going to use social network platforms instead. And noone *ever* “wastes too much time” on those :-)

Happy Christmas
Andrew

PS What do I see below this comment box? “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail”! Not dead yet, then ;-)

Currently, email is by far and away the most common way people contact me. I’ll get maybe two or three phone calls in a day, zero instant messages or texts, and about 200 emails. Granted, 150 of those are not useful emails. But the remainder still dwarfs what’s left.

But OK, that’s just me. My mobile phone is usually turned off and lost somewhere in the house, the battery drained. I don’t use an instant messaging client because ICQ never worked with MSN, which never worked with AOL, etc, etc. But I do have active Facebook and Twitter accounts (from which I’ll average a couple of messages a day) and I’m not *that* technologically archaic.

My newsletter statistics tell a similar story. My website gets a lot of views on the web – almost a million page views in the last six months – and the number of email recipients of my newsletter continues to grow slowly, now over 3300 a day and around 5000 for the weekly. My Facebook friends, meanwhile, which peaked at 3000 or so, have *dropped* to 1800 – many people don’t want the newsletter in their social networking. And while the OLDaily Twitter account has almost 1500 subscribers, that’s still less than a third of the number subscribing to my personal account. RSS as well remains strong, with something like 5000 (or it could be 10,000 – I don’t have a good count, just Google Reader stats).

What does this tell me?

There may be a lot of traffic in social networks and instant messaging, but it’s personal traffic, replacing what used to be accomplished with a quick phone call. I’ve never really been a phone call person, and today I’m not an instant messaging person.

And there are two other observations I would make:

First, it’s not clear to me at least how successful Facebook and Twitter would be without email and the web. Especially the web. Both services depended a lot – and to a certain extent still depend – on email notifications to get off the ground. I would probably never visit Facebook unless an email notification reminded me that people want to friend me, or that someone has sent me a Facebook message (the same was true of twitter until I turned it off).

Second, a significant part of the traffic on Twitter and Facebook point to those very web contents that i also send by email (journalists say that most of that traffic points to professional news content, but I’m not sure the numbers would bear that out). RSS, email and the web are all different facets of the same content, at least when email is thought of from the perspective of email lists, as opposed to quick person-to-person messages.

When Google+ came out I thought that it might be a viable alternative to web or email (I’m sure Google thought so too – a Wave that works, I can imagine them saying to themselves). But with the same sort of limitations imposed on users as those by Facebook and Twitter – the walled-garden effect, with a clampdown on links out – Google+ is also aiming for the same personal traffic as the other services. There’s a lot of such traffic – the telephone was successful, and so should be these services, over time.

But people do *not* want to use those channels for more formal communications, no more than they want to receive advertising or music over their telephones. These communications rely on what are being represented here as ‘old’ technologies – email and the web. Longer and more in-depth content will continue to be transmitted over these channels (or something similar, but *not* something like instant messaging or social networking).

So – as you ask – what will replace email and/or RSS and/or the web in the future, if not Google+? Probably our best clues are found in iPhone and iPad apps. Though these platforms are not as open as the devices of the future will be, the sort of functionality found in apps will come to characterize what we will find in web pages and email messages in general (indeed, if one were to measure the app market side by side with with social networks or instant messaging, we would be tempted to rashly predict the death of the latter!).

We need to work out some things. These apps (or at least the data they run on) have to be interoperable. Though the walled-garden works for Apple now, in a wider market it will be unsustainable. Additionally, with the proliferation of mobile content that actually does something on your device, security will have to be dramatically improved (indeed, security is the paramount reason why Apple has employed the walled garden – it keeps the incidence of spam, virii and phishing way down, unlike (say) contemporary email.

The more formal content of the future will resemble the magazine apps of today, with built-in hooks to social networks (to support back-chatter) but also to live data, analytics, interactive media, smart functionality, game-like or simulated behaviour, and other goodies I can’t even begin to think of today. Like web 2.0, in other words, but without the sensation of being tied together with duct tape and Javascript.

And while in some cases these new products are being displayed on completely new platforms (like iOS or Android) they will also be displayed on the good-old-web and delivered via RSS, email or personal subscription (which for all practical purposes are in this context indistinguishable from each other). They will not be displayed on the Facebook, Twitter or Google+ ‘platforms’, no more than you would read a magazine by radio.

People creating email, web and RSS products are already well into the design of corresponding apps. As these apps gain in popularity, the numbers of the ‘traditional’ services will decline. But the numbers in social networks or instant messages won’t increase correspondingly – because social networks and instant messaging are not replacing email, the web and RSS, no matter what the numbers seem to show.