[FoRK] The death of email?

[Simon Wistow]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 01:44:11PM -0800, Stephen D. Williams said:
> Young people seem to universally avoid email.  Probably because of spam.
> I suppose their "shout outs" on MySpace et al are email in a different 
> form, but it is a shallow step backward.

I've been pondering this for a while.

Part of the problem - in fact I mused incoherently about it here -

   http://deflatermouse.livejournal.com/140172.html

is that whilst Facebook Mail in and of itself is actually pretty bad if 
you think of FB in general as not much more than a rich mail system then 
things start to make more sense.

Someone mentioned something about party invites and why it couldn't be 
just be done with email. But it's not just the invite - it's the landing 
page with the map and the subsequent updates and the photos and the list 
of attendees. 

Not only that but someone can send you an invitation to a Poker or Risk 
or Scrabble game and you can just start playing them without having to 
download or install anything and everything's already got a list of your 
friends.

Whilst stuff like OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial are a step forward I 
worry that 90% of people don't give two moist craps about open 
standards. So unless we (and here I wave me hands vaguely) come up with 
a credible alternative then we're going to end up having to interoperate 
with some sort of proprietary email-esque system. 

Although, having said that, the situation is sort of analogous to the IM 
situation a few years ago and that seems to be naturally converging 
towards XMPP so maybe I'm just full of doom and gloom.

Simon