Email is so last year

Do you use platforms like Twitter, Facebook and IM in preference of email?

  • Yes

    Votes: 22 14.2%

  • No

    Votes: 133 85.8%
  • Total voters
    155
email has ruled since the 80's, I don't see that changing any time soon.
 
rpm said:
But we can not argue with its popularity...just strange that people are happy to be restricted to 140 characters. Only enough to express an emotion or give a basic opinion.
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Twitter
When I first noticed Twitter I thought it was a load of rubbish, but as I started following people who had similar interests, it opened a whole new world to me. Twitter's Search function alone is brilliant as a service on its own. Just about any major news story of relevance is usually picked up on Twitter first (or published first) but more importantly, you can then follow the development of that major event in *realtime* throughout the event. Add to this twitter's extensions for easy browser or smartphone access and you're good to go.

Also, if any service of any kind goes down, I just search for those keywords using Twitter Search first and if 2000 others have the same problem, I'll see it immediately. No need to check with any company or wait if someone may or may not reply to my own forum thread; I already know whether the problem is only affecting me or not which makes troubleshooting much easier. There are several examples like that which makes Twitter rather unique, since everything is published and read in realtime.

The trick is to "follow" the right people; those who have something substantial to say (and the wordsmiths can actually manage 140 chars easily). I will never understand why anyone would want to follow some celeb who tweets about his toothbrush when in fact you could be following your favourite journo who frequently tweets about the the issues that matter to you, not to mention the 'breaking news' tweets that effectively competes with RSS feeds\. It also gives you access to those people.

EMAIL
As for email dying... perhaps a percentage of teenagers will agree with the author of the article. Email as a business tool is still widely used and very important; I rely on it quite heavily. GMail and filters = magic. Easy to search for important info, can store anything, it's fast and versatile. It's still the first thing I check when I start my day and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

FB
I use Facebook more socially to stay in touch with old friends and share the odd photo album with them but over the last two years I have found myself using Twitter much more than I do Facebook, simply because FB does not provide the wealth of realtime news feeds that Twitter does.

As the saying goes, Facebook is for the people you went to school with, Twitter is for the people you wish you went to school with. :)

I don't necessarily see these services competing directly with each other though, they all have advantages and disadvantages.
 
Agreed with most ppl here. E-mail has been "dying" for 10 years now. At least according to reporters trying to create a stir. Facebook is a completely inapropriate medium for corporate communication. Talk about spam. How much "spam" do you get from your facebook friends, let alone what will happen if you have to open it up to the rest of the world.

Sorry I'm venting. I'm off to jhb tomorrow and I dont wanna go! They can't make me! Apparently they can.
 
huh Imagine facebooking a company for service!
Myadsl actually paying for articles like these??
 
There's a reason why email has been the de facto standard of electronic communication for so long: because it works. Facebook and Twitter may be a new way of communicating but nothing is going to replace email.

As for the author's comments on spam - it's a non-issue. My Gmail account has over [-]9000[/-] 1000 messages marked as spam, all of which were caught by Google's filters. Should Facebook/Twitter/et al. become popular enough to actually be spammed, I doubt they will be able to deal with the problem as easily and efficiently as it's done now.
 
Seems like the author of this post was trying to shift you people to join Facebook and tweeter. But i guess he/she failed. Email is here to stay
 
Alistair is so "last year..." Get rid of him, with his e-mail. Facecook is duh, Tweeter is even more duh... Like most of my real friends, I don't need their e-mail addresses, I have their numbers, and most of them nowadays are back on landlines.
 
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Sigh! if only Facebook and Twitter were less prone to spam - not external spam - friendly spam - one of my friends has an app that "auto tweets" and "auto Google Buzzes" everytime his bloody calendar status changes - so no, it is not a replacement for email and won't be for a long time to come - besides, how do you get any work done when you're tweeting and twitting every other minute (MyBB F5 is bad enough as it is!)
 
How on earth can anyone say E-Mail is dying... maybe if you are a school kid ?? It's a formal communication tool between individuals and companies. Maybe I should tweet SARS to get my tax money back.
 
Anybody who downloads their e-mail and only then sorts out spam and junk should not write articles about e-mail. Ever heard of Mailwasher?
 
For pretty much every point mentioned in the the article Gmail is the answer.
Twitter is for twits with a 140 byte RAM - seriously - if you are only executing tasks with a 140 byte payload you are really stupid. Facebook is for sharing pics and events with social groups, its got nothing to do with communication in the email style of things.

Yes despite all that, Outlook 2010 has plugins to most of these sites which allows everyone you email to see what you did last summer and view your resume on LinkedIn.
 
Yes, I can see how the CEO of a company would want to look at your new puppy or the tatoo on your wife's ass while discussing the specifics of launching that R75million project... It makes perfect sense...

Either the author is a socialite, or he/she works at some artsy fartsy place where every piece of communication is wrapped in 50 smilies and all kinds of pretty little hoping bunnies and ****...
 
Meh... I get more spam on facebook then email
 
It would seem that the author of this article is rather out of touch with reality. Which is strange for someone who writes for an IT website...
 
"Do you use platforms like Twitter, Facebook and IM in preference of email?"
NO!
Well, IM maybe, but don't bag it with things like Twitter and Facebook o.O
 
Doubt it - we need records - written records - so IM does not give this relaibly - email lives on....
 
This is a debate that many other IT Sites and Blogs touched on last year already, and I'm sure it will continue to be debated back and forth for some time still. My favourite response was from Paul Anderson, a Strategic Marketing Consultant for Emailvison:

I have a great book – written in 1977 – predicting the future. Apparently by 2010 we would all be flying around in our own private hovercraft! In other words we, especially marketers, continually overestimate the impact new technologies will have.
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