We're all killing off email

Those out on the frontiers of technology have been saying for years that email is dying. But 2011 looks like the year when it finally begins its slide into obsolescence. Before we know it, email will seem as quaint as the fax machine and dial-up accounts.

Last week, Jack Dorsey, the 34-year-old chairman and co-founder of Twitter, said in an interview that he now rarely uses email. He finds it useful for formal communications, which may need to be referenced and searched in the future. But the great bulk of his communication is done via instant messaging, in which, he said, the subject is the message. It is much closer to actual speech than a written note. "It's bringing the content to you right away."

And he's not alone. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, calls email "formal" compared with texting, instant messaging and updating your Facebook page. Cheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, said last year that email "is probably going away". She said that "if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today." Only 11 per cent of American teenagers, she said, now email daily. They much prefer more instantaneous forms of electronic conversation.

It was in response to this that Facebook launched its own messaging service in the US last year (coming to the UK later this year), in which you can see texts, emails, invitations, updates and photos all in one place, accessible on any device.

The subtext of all this is that if you are still relying on email for most of your electronic communication, you are woefully behind the times. From Facebook's perspective, you may as well be sending out carrier pigeons or smoke signals.

Surveys of email usage have shown that in the United States it peaked in 2008, when business users were sending or receiving on average 140 emails per day. This fell to 93 last year, and is expected to fall to 84 this year. Social network accounts are fast closing on email accounts. In 2010, there were 2.9 billion email accounts in the world and 2.1 billion social network accounts. By 2014, Nielsen estimates there will be 3.8 billion email accounts and 3.6 billion social network accounts.

It all make sense from an efficiency perspective. Social network services have eliminated the need for vast amounts of email. If you wish to communicate your location to a group of friends, you need only update it on your Facebook page rather than sending out a group email. They can even track you using a location-based mobile app, so you are spared having to explain why you are late and where you are in multiple emails.

The same goes for work. It is much easier now to notify a group of people about meetings or collaborate in real time on a project through Facebook Messages than it used to be via email. Communication is no longer a question of managing your inbox and outbox, electronic versions of desk accessories, but rather dipping in and out of a constant flow of conversation which whirls around us.

For marketers, the advantages of this are enormous. Building up lists of thousands of email addresses was laborious, difficult work. Today, you can tweet on a subject, tag it and quickly reach an interested audience. You no longer have to find your audience. Say something worth hearing, and they will quickly find you.
Similarly, if you send someone a marketing pitch via email, it will likely end up in their Trash file. Have friends recommend products on Facebook, Sandberg claims, and the recipient of the recommendation is 400 per cent more likely to buy the product.

There will, of course, still be reasons to use email. For some, email's formality will always be more attractive. An email exposes nothing but your email address and the content of the email. Communication via social networks or Twitter involves a far greater exposure of your identity. Communicate on Facebook, and, depending on your privacy settings, people might see who your friends are, see pictures of you and your family and know exactly where you are and what you are doing. For younger people, this doesn't seem to be an issue at all, while older people fret over the consequences of revealing so much about themselves online.

Marketers, however, are finding that for all the supposed risks of living your life online, whatever their age, the users of social networks tend to be authentic. They are honest about what they like and dislike, whether it's a band, a politician or a hobby. Openness is contagious and this extends to post-email forms of communication. People are more intimate and honest without the filters of email.

Email may be efficient for arranging things but it's lousy for collaboration. Compared with using the applications on Facebook, email feels as if you are sending footmen back and forth carrying messages on trays. For collaboration you need, in Dorsey's phrase, for the "technology to disappear", for the back and forth to occur in real time, without any laborious attachments or people lingering hesitantly over the Send button. When you want to show people something, you should be able to bring it right up on-screen as you talk and have them see it and work on it with you as you talk.