Does email have a place in our online future?

As people expect faster communication, email as we know it seems doomed, says John Hearne

“That was weird. Just had to send an email. Don’t really get it. Why do I have to put in a subject line? Waste of time.”

Communications expert Damien Mulley came across that tweet in Nov 2010, when he was studying how young people use technology to communicate.

It was posted by a teenager who, while well versed in social networking, had never sent an email before. The experience so surprised Mulley that he went on to conduct a survey. He polled more than 100 teenagers on how they communicated with friends.

Text messaging was the most popular, with 56% citing it as their preferred method of communication. About 38% used Facebook and 28% used their phones to actually speak to their friends. Only 27% used email.

The results point to a revolution in the making. According to 2009 data, email was still Irish people’s No 1 activity online. This week saw the 20th anniversary of the sending of the first attachment via email. But with young people abandoning it in their droves, can it survive to enjoy its 30th?

Just as video killed the radio star, social media, instant messaging, and texting have encroached on email’s long-held status as the only way to communicate on the internet. For those of us old enough to remember the ponderousness of communications before email, it’s hard to believe there are people out there for whom it’s just not fast enough anymore.

The reality is that instant messaging services such as Blackberry Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger allow people to communicate more or less in real time; IM users are predicted to exceed 1.3bn worldwide by 2016.

It is with these dynamics in mind that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook Messages, which merges texting, IM and email into a single interface. “High school kids,” he said, “don’t want email.”

They are not the only ones. Late last year, French IT giant Atos banned its 74,000 employees from using email. Chief executive Thierry Breton claimed only 10% of the 200 emails each employee received every day actually turned out to be useful. Atos staff adopted instant messaging and an in-house social network which will allow chat and content pooling.

Its detractors point out that email was better suited to the way we used to use the internet, in the days of logging on and off. But “always-on” technology keeps us permanently logged in. We have lifestyles that can’t tolerate waiting for a reply to an email. Facebook means we know what friends are doing without having to ask.

Your Twitter followers know what you thought of the Grand Canyon, or the gig you were at last night — or even the one you’re at right now.

Tech guru Rob Enderle says all of these things have pushed email to the back end of its lifecycle. “And unless someone revitalises it, it’s demise is eventually certain.”

But the technorati have been prophesying the death of email for years. Even Enderle admits that it still has its uses.

“Email is still better for one-to-one, asynchronous and content-heavy communication... until something comes in that can fully replace the depth of email, I doubt we’ll be able to estimate when it will become obsolete.”

Can these communications technologies co-exist?

Cormac Parle, a programmer in a Dublin-based technology company, says: “Any topic-based discussion is usually email, because chat goes off-topic so fast, and also it’s harder on IM to specifically address different bits of what someone else has said.”

In the ephemeral world of electronic communications, email has a solidity that IM lacks. If you buy a flight online, your ticket will land in your inbox. If you buy a book on Amazon and it goes missing in the post, you’ll go back to your inbox to pick up the trail that will get you your money back. Roger Kay of Endpoint technologies points out that you still need an email account to join Twitter and Facebook.

Moreover, just because email isn’t a favoured method of communication for young people doesn’t mean it will stay out in the cold as their needs and responsibilities change.

Kay says: “Children with no obligations can chat up their friends on Facebook. But adults need to be able to do business and exchange information and documents with potentially anyone on the planet… Short of it: Social is for play; email is for real life.”

And of course, this is a dynamic world, where technologies and how they’re used constantly feed into each other. Damien Mulley says that while he still relies heavily on email, the emails he is sending these days differ markedly from those he used to send.

“It’s all short bursts. Twitter and text messaging has changed the way email works. You get to the point in the subject line, with two or three additional lines at most. I get someone who rambles on for four or five paragraphs, I just delete their email and ignore what they’re saying.”

Is email dead? No. Dying? Maybe. Changing? Most definitely.