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Old 11 Jan 2017, 12:18 AM   #28
jhollington
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 371
I think it's still a matter of using the best tool for the job. IMHO, text and instant messaging solutions are better for "real-time" communication, and frankly where such conversations should go.

Over a decade ago I had a client actually ask me to deploy an IM solution within their corporate network primarily because their email system was getting cluttered with "Let's do lunch" or "How was the party last night" conversations between folks that were generally better suited to instant messaging. The biggest problem there wasn't the flow of messages, but the reality that people would basically never clean up their inboxes, which left this kind of cruft in the system over the course of years.

That said, none of them would have ever considered replacing their email system with messaging-based solutions. Email was still better for "long-form" communication and collaboration, as well as of course communicating with those outside of the organization.

But even from a non-business point of view, the reality is that we've been hearing about the decline of email for years as new companies try to form their own solutions, but it's important to remember that really we're living in an era of more and more communication "silos" designed by companies that want their proprietary standards to be adopted as the de facto new system. So we have iMessage, BBM, Facebook Messenger, Google+ Hangouts, Whatsapp, Twitter DMs, and the list goes on.

Email actually remains the one open standard method of communication. Although different systems certainly add their own proprietary features on the client side (e.g. Gmail's "labels" and Apple's push notification system), the underlying technology that supports email is based on completely open standards that anybody can design around.

Consider everybody you might ever want to communicate with, from your dentist and banker to your family and friends, and then ask yourself what's the one, single communication system that can be used to reach ALL of them. The only answer for most people is quite probably "email." Even in my case, my friends and family are on a mix of social networks and mobile phone platforms. SMS texting becomes a close second, but most people are naturally more reticent to publish their phone number, it's not a suitable way to communicate with a business as opposed to a person, and even in this day and age there are people who have email addresses that still don't have phones.

Another consideration is that email is much more useful as a "low priority" communications channel. If I have something to send to a friend that's not important enough to want to grab their attention immediately, email is the better way to do it. I can send an email to somebody at 1 AM and generally don't have to worry about disturbing them. This is usually not the case with how most people configure their IM or text messaging to work.
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