Facebook, Twitter, IM, SMS…oh so many ways to communicate other than email, so you’d think that email was on the outs? Yeah, not so much. Turns out that not only is email still going strong, but there is no ready alternative in sight:
Though email is effectively a prehistoric web service, dating back to the launch of the World Wide Web, it maintains its dominance as the most effective communications method we have still today. Email isn’t dead, nor is it ‘on its way out’. Regardless of the ‘Facebook effect’ and other growing social networks and instant messaging services have on the younger Generation Y, there is no viable replacement in sight.
link: Email is far from dead; ‘no viable replacement’ in sight | ZDNet
Really, this isn’t a surprise to us, nor should it be to any of you. As much as email is pretty antiquated as the Internet goes (one of the first applications created), it still works great.
Except it just wasn’t really built for a lot of what we need it for now.
Email wasn’t ever intended to be terribly private. When POP and SMTP were created about 20 years ago, as much as we’d have wanted to secure communications with encryption, computers weren’t really ready for it.
So here we are now, addicted to email, but no easy solution to communicate securely.