In my I Love Email post, I got a wonderful comment from my friend Fred Wilson that said:
to each his/her own these days. my kids use facebook and text messaging for the most part but now that they have email on their phones (bberry and iphone) they use that as well, but it’s not their primary messaging system. i still use email as my primary method, but as someone else said, it’s the new snail mail. i hate doing it and its a chore. i called it "homework" on twitter today. that’s how i feel about it. i find text messaging and twitter are best for me, but they will only be better for a while. they will get more noisy and i’ll have to move to something else. i don’t use facebook messaging at all. when people send me facebook messages, they are talking to a black hole
To that I say "Correct!" When I say "email", I’m really saying "messaging", although I hate the phrases "messaging" and "collaboration".
Deva Hazarika, the CEO of ClearContext, has an excellent followup post titled Three next steps for email. In it he identifies three areas where email clients haven’t kept up with the pace of change (volume, integration, and context.) I’ll add a fourth – social graph – I only want one of them!