I rediscovered my old AOL e-mail account this week and was taken down e-memory lane as the famous “You’ve Got Mail!” message boomed from the PC speaker as I signed in. After years of neglect and only spam in my inbox, it was like a voice from beyond the grave – and with the same old US accent they never localised for the UK with a British voice proclaiming: “Post Is Here!”
I had logged in because I was taking the pulse of e-mail in general. Its obituary has been written repeatedly by the media over the past 10 years – strangled by spam in 2003, smothered by social networks in 2007 and razed by real-time communication such as Google Wave in 2009, before predictions of being finished off by Facebook Messages this year.
Spam is still a problem but more contained. Social networks give us peripheral vision of what our friends are up to but there is still a need for the e-mail equivalent of direct eye-contact. Wave, now cast adrift by Google, showed it was cool to see someone live-typing to you character by character, but it was never going to be the best way to organise your life. Facebook Messages looks promising for communicating with friends in new ways, but not for business use.