Western Union announced on Friday, 1/27/06, that the age of the telegram had officially ended. The Western Union website has the following comment on it.
Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.
Presumably they don’t expect you to contact them via telegram (they provide a nice email form, physical mail, and a bunch of 800 numbers.) I imagine that someday in the future a similar message will go out on some other communication medium about “the death of email.” I wonder how that’s going to work.