Email is definitely headed towards extinction. This past weekend at the Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami they predicted just that.
Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company’s OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a “strange legacy idea.”
“E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don’t use e-mail,” he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. “They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day…they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank.” Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses–URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.
I’ve talked about the death of email before. What the replacement will be is not sure yet, but it will not be a new proprietary service like twitter or Pownce, but rather a social protocol similar to Googles’s Social Graph API.
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