Be warned, those who just completed an e-mail course for seniors; better stop reading at the end of this sentence. Because email is tired, not wired, so outdated, has-been, redundant. Email is not cool, no more, Internet youth (is there youth somewhere that doesn’t use Internet?) use email for only thing: to communicate with old people.
Youth rather use – apart from mobile phone text messaging – something form the broad spectrum of different ways of chat serving, like Windows Live Messenger, MSN, GoogleTalk, or one of the numerous chat servers on the Internet, or somewhere in some online community.
In Dutch at @ DutchCowboys
According to an analysis on the Ars Technica website, that made headlines last week in media all over the web, it’s not only the youngest generations of Internet users. This new trend also causes some problems on universities; student start missing announcements or are breaking deadlines because they are not using email anymore.
Being a journalist myself I know some of us are more than happy to produce intriguing headlines that invite reading their articles. Worse; that some – not all – journos produce conclusions that make the researchers they are writing about, scratch their heads. When you read – easy in Internet times – the original research yourself, you can make your own conclusion.
In this case it is true that 8 percent less of American teenagers are indeed using no more e-mail, but almost 90 percent is still using mail.
While we’ll see how this sinking curve will be developing, it’s also a matter of the way you look at things. I am communicating all day, but very rarely I use GoogleTalk, actually only when another Gtalker pops up on one of my screens. Matter of looking at things: if you mail a remark to somebody else on line, and that somebody else replies a line or two, and we keep doing that for a while, one might says a chat session is functioning. The technique, the protocol in use may be a little bit different, but the users experience is exactly the same.
By the way: if you save a GoogleTalk session, and you open it some time later to find out what the hack you were chatting – sorry, mailing – about, it’s just the same as opening an old e-mail thread. With all the questions and answers, mails and replies. It may be tired and outdated, I’m sure I’ll be using my Gmail for quite some time to come.