In Defense of Email Follow-Up: I'm not the only one who's defending email!

by Ron Daly 

Last week, I reacted to an article from the Wall Street Journal about the impending death of email. I tried to give credit to Twitter, Facebook, etc. for the roll they've played in changing how we chatter at each other day-to-day. 

Kit Eaton at FastCompany.com put together a great story called "Why Twitter and Facebook Will Never Kill E-mail". This article points to some interesting findings from Nielsen and some facts about email that many overlook when they dismiss email as "on it's way out". 

For one, you can't send files directly via "tweet" - and, for all I know, you can't do that over Facebook, either. You can provide links and downloadable files that are hosted elsewhere, but these messages don't have the capacity to carry vital info. And who owns that info when you upload it? Rights issues are plaguing this new territory right now, and corporate/private communication can't be done in the blind - or worse, in an environment where security isn't prized. 

But maybe the best point brought up about email in this article is the idea of simplicity. Email is easy to learn and to use (for most). People have spent the past year squawking about Twitter being impossible to understand and arguing about its usefulness. Seems to me there might have been an hour-long window where the people who invented the first email systems were asking themselves "When will this ever be of any use to anyone?" Then they realized that email was sending messages in seconds when it formerly took days. 

While we're talking about email's long life, this Google Wave affair is interesting. Real time communication mixed with email mixed with...well, I'm not really sure. Jimmy, my Creative Media Directory, has been sniffing around for invites. Has anyone used it? Can we get some information on how it handles? Talk to us about it.