eMail is for old people (and that includes me I guess) - the end of eMail as a social tool?

I am 47 and I just realized something (probably belatedly so) that I think is important to share with you: the Digital Natives [Wikipedia explains] the Net Generation, the 10-27 year-olds, don't use email like we do. For them, emailing means business, parents, government and other unfortunately unavoidable stuff. If they want to communicate (and that means 2-way now), they will twitter each other, leave messages on Facebook or Myspace, Orkut, Cyworld, StudiVZ, Mixi, or subscribe to each other's blog feeds or follow each other on Friendfeed (well.. yes, mostly the geeky ones), or chat on IM, via QQ or talk / video-talk on Skype, or SMS each other (worth $100 Billion in 2007). Even more importantly, they share stuff in order to im- and explicitly communicate to each other by aligning with personalized content that shows who they are, such as posting and commenting on youtube, sharing pictures on Flickr, bookmarking stuff they find on delicious, sharing slideshows and presentations on Slideshare, music recommendations on Last.fm and iLike... and so on.

eMail is way too formal, too direct, too organized, too PUSH for them, and is usually used more in the same way that we 'older' people used the fax or even good old snail mail. And the age range that deserts email as a social tool is increasing every week - this is one of the reasons why I recently junked my monthly email newsletter: it had become pretty much like flogging a dead horse, there was no conversation, no 2-way process.

This trend makes a huge difference for marketing and selling stuff online (or... rather, period): you don't get to push to these people anymore, you must PULL. You must get them to befriend you on the social networks, sign up for your RSS feed, follow you on Twitter - in other words, you must offer value and merit, and build trust. You don't own them, somewhere deep inside your databases - they own YOU in their minds, or Not. Ouch. Good. Yes?  Talk back --- comment below! 

Update: Alex at ReadWriteWeb has previously written about this - just discovered his column here

Comments

[Claire]

I am 22 and that's right I realize with your post that indeed I dislike emailing.

Send email is not easy in comparison with using facebook, twitter...

[Charlotte]

We have recently been running focus groups around the Digital Native and found that the younger (up to 19-20) didn't use email and couldn't figure out what it was for .. but that older Natives who were in their first job and generally more "grown up" began to use it because they didn't have the time to communicate immediately with everyone any more and they could see that it was a useful tool, after all. So I think there is a generational thing going on here.

[bksmyth]

I am concerned about the possible “over connectivity” of twitter. When things become that informal and that readily available, content quality drops. In my humble opinion, socially twitter is cute. Although generally, we have to come up with something that promotes complete, thought out, decent content; or at the very least brings this content to the top. While we sit in a renaissance of creative thought and freedom of expressions that can be shared by anyone to anyone; what is set into place to guard us all from the garbage? If everyone can show us who they are… well do we really want that? Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/) mentioned in his blog yesterday that you can search the content of twitter. If you get a minute have a look at the minutia that takes up people’s time: http://search.twitter.com/

What good is it to share things with people if those things do not enhance the value of their day?

[Gerd Leonhard]

Ed Kless says: Without (some) order nothing can exist --- Without chaos nothing can grow!

[Herman]

Working with e-mail as main communication proffessionally, I see the trend you are describing, and a serious backside: as the young users choose not to relate to e-mail in their communication, and getting used to chatroom communication, they present themselves increasingly unproffessionally those few times they have to communicate throuth e-mail, as they are not able to express their thoughts in complete and formally correct/meaningful gramatic terms. Half sentences with no obvious reference points are not efficient, and are without (or with little) value if these young people should end up in a legal disagreement with e-mail correspondence as only documentation.

[Gerd Leonhard]

Hermann, totally agree with you on that - but this is still very very early and will out be worked out over time!

[Luigi Cappel]

I sometimes wish I didn't use email anymore either, but I do get lots of information from it. As to my friends, I'm generation C and pretty much all my family communication is on Facebook and much of my networking is done on Twitter.
My kids rarely look at email, I can't get away with it because of business which also extendsw to my Blackberry.
Insightful:)

[Mihai Secasiu]

The best part about email is that email is decentralized. It's based on the same principles as the Internet, and the protocols that power the internet and have been working for 30 years. I'd like to see how facebook, twitter or other social networks would evolve (or be extinct) in 30 years.
Businesses and professionals would never trust a single company to handle their sensitive data and communication. Sure they need to start using the new tools to reach potential customers, provide support and manage their reputation but I think comparing email to these new tools doesn't make sense.
Everybody ( even the new tools ) are using email for transactional conversations. Email is considered an ID in the Internet. I'd like to see twitter or facebook used as a platform for receiving service subscription confirmation messages. But I don't think this ever happened so you see even the new generation need email to use the new tools.
I doubt email will die soon.

[Gerd Leonhard]

With Google and Facebook Friend Connect this will become possible, as well. Email will not die, it will just become less dominant in terms of communicating!

[Siobhan]

As much as I love facebook, email will always hold a special tab in my browser.

[Mr J]

Email is pro-level communication. The rest are fine as social tools, but have not developed as yet into a replacement. I guess they'll all rub along for a while yet.

http://www.scalemodelnews.com