Last month, I had an opportunity to talk with Ray Tomlinson, the guy who put the @ sign in your email, about his invention becoming the bedrock of communication. And since less is more, I told Ray that I forgave him for filling up my email inbox everyday.
Email has had a good run as king of communications. However, a new generation of social networking services is starting to take hold---services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others are vying for a place in people-to-people communication. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate--in ways we can only begin to imagine.
Email continues to grow. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. While the number of users of social networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.
Consider, Twitter. The service allows users to send a 140-character message to people who have subscribed to see them, called followers. You can also create links to particular users in messages by entering Ray Tomlinson's @ followed by their user name or send private "direct messages" through the system by typing d and the user name.
Of course, the obvious downside to the constant stream of messages is: It's a constant stream...and...that can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. That's why a number of Twitter software programs filter Tweets by tags, making it easier to follow a topic.
The big question is: Will the new services save time, or eat up even more of it?
Source: The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2009