Roger Matus picks up an interesting blog post by John McKinley, former President of AOL Digital Services, pondering about the future of email, as we know it. McKinley makes the argument that email is long overdue to be displaced by a fundamentally new communication metaphor referring to the onslaught of new tools, such as Twitter, Facebook, SMS, IM and others.

McKinley is not the first nor will he be the last to hail the end of email, but I think he is missing the point.

Roger sums it up rather well:

“I agree that email will change over time. There will be more efficient content monitoring and prioritization. Maybe the spam problem will be licked. It will also learn from the items John mentioned for new features.

But, email was evolutionary and based on a proven model — namely the post office. It traces its history back to 1516, when Henry VIII established a “Master of the Posts”. The Royal Mail service was first made available to the public by Charles I on July 31, 1635. (Wikipedia)

So, new technology will incorporate new features. But, email is here to stay.”

The problems associated with email today are largely a side effect of its pervasiveness and robustness, resulting in overuse and targeted abuse. New communication tools will offload some of that burden, but will equally have to solve their own problems of misuse as we can already observe with the occurrence of SMS & IM spam or the defacement of wiki entries and Facebook walls.

Unified communication in the form of email integrated with IM chat, presence and VOIP in conjunction with social platforms will complete email not displace it.

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