Mark Zuckerberg just sent out an email to the media that email is dead. The irony of his sending that message in an email aside, I think he’s wrong—at least for a little while, anyway.
Email isn’t dead yet. It’s just gotten a little pudgy around the middle as it’s aged. (All those empty calories from spam.)
Zuckerberg’s reasoning seems to stem from the fact that teenagers aren’t using email as much as they used to or as much as older folks. The kids don’t use it, and kids are the trendsetters. They text, they post on Facebook, they don’t email.
First of all, Zuckerberg’s assertion is a little too calculated to carry any real weight, seeing how Facebook just launched a messaging service for mobile phones. That alone kind of takes the sting out of his argument.
But more than that, using teenagers as a barometer for this is kind of like asking forty-somethings about retirement benefits. Teenagers don’t really use email…yet…because they don’t work.
Which brings me to the main reason why I think email will be around for a while yet: attachments. While there are some file-sharing websites out there like Dropbox for storing and sharing files in the cloud, those things haven’t taken hold yet.
Here’s how this goes at the moment (from someone who actually has a Dropbox account).
Me: “Dude, can you send me that file?”
Hipster Dufus (HD): “Sure. Do you have a Dropbox account?”
Me: “Yeah.”
HD: “It’s awesome, right? You can share huge files.”
Me: “It’s just a Word doc.”
HD: “But it’s way cool. I’ll send you an invite to the doc.”
Me: “Can you just email it to me? It’s easier.”
HD: “But that’s old school.”
Me: “…So?”
HD: “But it’s old school.”
Me: “Okay, Geekoid. Can I just get the file?”
You get the picture.
Anyway, Facebook will probably try to take over the file-sharing niche, but there’s Facebook’s security issues—they own everything on their site, so users couldn’t share files with any kind of privacy.
In my opinion, it’ll take a game-changer (or paradigm shift if you want be that guy) to supplant email—something we haven’t thought of yet. So for now at least, email is safe. It just needs to go on a diet.
