Apparently "Web 2.0" types haven't tired of talking about the death of e-mail.  CNet's Caroline McCarthy has an article about discussions being had at the "Future of Web Apps" conference that wrapped up last week.  Here's a quote...

The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting.

...

And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg's Kevin Rose, Pownce's Leah Culver, and Flickr's Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new Web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren't totally ironed out.)

There are basically two points here, (1) young people don't use e-mail and (2) e-mail is inefficient so businesses will stop using it in lieu of something else.

The first point is one I've addressed on this blog before.  I hate to quote myself but I hate typing something I've already said more.  Given that I quote from a post I made a few months ago entitled "E-Mail is dead, again, for like the 200th time"...

Point #1: Slate says that e-mail is dead because kids don’t use it and businesses usually end up adopting what the kids do rather than the other way around. To that, I say hogwash (though half of that is just because I don’t get to use the word “hogwash” anywhere near as much as I’d like).

Here’s the thing, I’m in my late 20s and when I was a kid I didn’t use e-mail. People seem to forget that IM has been around since the 70s and in some popular form for the last 12+ years (I used Compuserve, ICQ and eventually AIM when I was in high school). So why isn’t e-mail already dead?

Two reasons, One teenagers only talk to who they want to talk to where as adults have to deal with people they (a) don’t know and (b) don’t like. When you are an adult dealing with one of those two scenarios it helps to have e-mail. Two, adults sometimes need to document their conversations where teenagers do not. At work I e-mail as much as possible because I want to be able to trace the day I said a certain thing or prove that someone was told something they claim they never knew. Bottom line, e-mail will get adopted by today’s teenagers because it is the best tool for the jobs they will face as adults.

'nuff said.

On the second point I have a better question..."Why haven't we just fixed e-mail?"

There have been dozens if not hundreds of e-mail solutions that would virtually eliminate spam (which is the main problem behind e-mail).  All of these solutions were technologically viable so that isn't the problem and a new solution isn't going to fix anything. 

The issue is universality not technology.  Ever wonder why PCs STILL come with 3.5" floppy drives?  Because universality is hard to come by and even harder to replace.  If even a small fraction of people resist change it fails because everyone else still needs to interact with that small number. 

Which is exactly why we still have e-mail.  No one wants to maintain two solutions and everyone knows there will be hold outs who resist which is why we get stuck.

How do we get this fixed?  The easiest way is to succeed at what people have been failing at thus far and convince the manufacturers of e-mail servers to agree on a secure e-mail standard.  The second and much less effective option is for someone to create a hybrid solution that is backwards compatible AND THEN make their new solution an open standard that other manufacturers could adopt. 

But even then your asking a manufacturer to put a  lot of money into a solution they'll have to give away and which still has a very small chance of becoming the de facto standard. 

It is a very difficult problem that goes completely unaddressed because everyone just wants to spout "e-mail is dead" and then discuss pie in the sky replacements.  Software development is about defining a problem and then working to fix it.  These conference discussions ignore the problem and then go on to talk about solutions that don't fix anything. 

The reason this bothers me is because most computer users still use technology that is 10 years behind (e-mail, unconnected desktop apps, etc...) because the industry isn't addressing their actual problems.  Just once I'd like to see an industry discussion that focuses on real world problems and not just impractical theory. 

There’s been a lot of talk about e-mail in the last couple of days first with the news that Yahoo is looking to turn its mail program into some kind of hybrid Social Network and then today where Slate declares “The Death of E-Mail” (at least in title, the actual article is a bit more balanced) 

One of the things I don’t think people realize is how prevalent the e-mail system is in the mind of an IT manager like me.  My systems run almost every function on my campus but if any of those systems were to go down for an hour I doubt anyone would be all that upset (not that I’m planning to let that happen).  But if the exchange server is down for more than 5 minutes I have at least 3 people telling me about it.   

E-Mail is still the life’s blood of just about every modern company.   

So now that I’ve given you a brief understanding of where I’m coming from I’d like to quickly address two aspects of the e-mail discussion that have been brought up in the various blog posts I’ve read.   

Point #1: Slate says that e-mail is dead because kids don’t use it and businesses usually end up adopting what the kids do rather than the other way around.  To that, I say hogwash (though half of that is just because I don’t get to use the word “hogwash” anywhere near as much as I’d like).   

Here’s the thing, I’m in my late 20s and when I was a kid I didn’t use e-mail.  People seem to forget that IM has been around since the 70s and in some popular form for the last 12+ years (I used Compuserve, ICQ and eventually AIM when I was in high school).  So why isn’t e-mail already dead?   

Two reasons, One teenagers only talk to who they want to talk to where as adults have to deal with people they (a) don’t know and (b) don’t like.  When you are an adult dealing with one of those two scenarios it helps to have e-mail.  Two, adults sometimes need to document their conversations where teenagers do not.  At work I e-mail as much as possible because I want to be able to trace the day I said a certain thing or prove that someone was told something they claim they never knew.  Bottom line, e-mail will get adopted by today’s teenagers because it is the best tool for the jobs they will face as adults.   

Point #2: E-Mail needs to die because it doesn’t work.  I agree that e-mail doesn’t work as well as it should but rather than kill it I’d like to address0 how it can be fixed.  The reality is that modern day e-mail doesn’t work very well because of the mountain of Spam that most people get.   2/3rds of the e-mail that we get through our mail server is spam (and those are only the ones the filter is catching).   

The reality is that e-mail isn’t going anywhere so we have to look at a way to fix it and that is going to mean that the industry has to get together and adopt one of the many secure e-mail proposals out there.  Everyone hates spam but I some times wonder if people realize how easy it would be to fix if vendors just cooperated with each other and defined some kind of trust standard at the server level.   

Sometimes in our modern arrogance we forget that time tested ways of doing things are still the best.  Letter writing and its successor E-Mail are still the best way to convey a lot of information and I think we’d all be better off trying to save it than we are pretending its about to die.