Hmm, I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, but this is a pretty lame article. It's more like a thinly veiled advertisement disguised as a thought-provoking content piece:

"People say email is dead. No, it's not! In fact, we've got this awesome email newsletter that's just for startup founders, and it's doing super awesome. Long live email!"

Gee that's...convenient.

Obviously email is not dead. But what about email newsletters? People actually still read these?

Apparently they do, since StartupDigest seems to have a successful model built around this, as do a few others. Why/how is it successful? Is the format truly superior to a blog? Is there a reason why email newsletter ONLY is superior to blog + email newsletter (+ RSS + Twitter + Facebook + etc.)?

These are questions which I'd have been interested in hearing the author's perspective on, but this article is nothing more than a bit of hype in response to another bit of hype.

Sorry if the post made you feel that way. I wrote it up after the quick discussion I had with Tyler.

Will definitley expand further upon this in the future and address the questions you have on email.

I've always thought these "email is dead or shortly will be" articles to be wildly presumptuous. The argument is generally that the tween/teen demographic hardly ever uses e-mail, and instead use facetwitsquarespace, hence as they grow up email will die out.

This argument is missing one huge point: what happens when these people go to work? How many businesses will want internal communications delivered over social networks?

Email, although far from perfect, is a wonderful work tool. It's private, it's asynchronous, it's distributed, it's cheap. I don't see this being replaced by social messaging.

I agree, almost all B2B communication is still via email.

Also there is the argument of how do you get your facebook/twitter DM notifications? Mostly through email. Even all of these social services ask for an email when you sign up and send emails to drive you back to the site.

Facebook is now one of the largest senders of email in the world..

Yes good point. I only ever log in to fb if I get an email alert. However, I imagine that a lot of (younger?) fb users are, like I am with email, permanently logged in, so they see stuff coming in.

Yeah - the B2B point also valid. "Uh, yeah, I'm just gonna message you this contract on facebook". I don't think so.

I'm not sure who the "many" people the author refers to who think Twitter will replace email, but they are certainly being hyperbolic.

I imagine what they really mean to say is that some sort of social identity will replace email as our manifestation of self online. That is to say, we used to default to email as the way we ran our Communications (big "C") as individuals.

"How can I find you online?" Oh, here's my email address.

But are people still identifying themselves that way?

8.3% of online time is spent with email (-28% shrink from last year). 22.7% of online time is spent social networking (+43% growth from last year). [Source: The Nielson Company, June 2010 data]

As we grow to use social accounts - Facebook, Google, Twitter - to sign up for stuff and spend most of our time there, the question is: will there be a psychological shift so that I am not uniquely identified by my email address, but rather by a richer and more controllable social profile?

"How can I find you online?" Oh, look me up on Facebook.

Already, I default to connecting with Not-Quite-Friends by telling them to find me online at my social profiles.

Once I give out my email address, I can never take it back, and everyone gets the same priority ("unread") whether you are my mother or a salesman.

I don't think anyone rationally disputes that email will always - or at least for a very long time - be something we use as a central way to communicate with people we have close relationships with; family, co-workers, anyone we have high frequency contact with.

But the author is - I assume because it's written on StartupDigest - trying to grasp the implications on how startups use these communication channels to reach & engage with customers.

In that respect: watch out, email may very well be dying.

"Once I give out my email address, I can never take it back, and everyone gets the same priority ("unread") whether you are my mother or a salesman."

This is true. But you don't have to give out your social network profile for anyone - requested or otherwise - to look you up, message you and potentially find out a whole bunch of stuff about you.

(E.g today I found out - accidently, I was browsing around - that an ex-gf stills live at the address she used to, who her boyfriend is and the fact that they are, I think, about to move house. I am not "friends" with either of them and their public profiles are private.)

Edit: this reminds me of an idea I had a while back: temporary email/contact addresses. Completely anonymous way of allowing people to contact you.

Yeah, but this is on the user. Things like my birthday and address aren't available to everyone, just enough information to identity me from other people with the same name.

As privacy controls normalize across less sophisticated users, I imagine more people will behave like us geeks. Or not - plenty of average Joe's still sort through 500 spam email every day by hand.

Yes, email isn't dead, neither is ice cream, shoes, reading, haircuts, breathing, christmas, weather, cups, the alphabet, kleenex, video games, sunglasses, intercourse, barrels, pigeons, onramps, krazy glue, pennies, and so forth....

how about a more important question, maybe one with a less obvious answer, like: is hacker news dead?

Yes, it's dead. You can officially stop checking in now.

in all seriousness, the articles posted on hn are typically interesting or at least well thought-out. but this one is just stupid. it doesn't make one think "well gee, IS email dead?" instead, one asks "what the fuck is wrong with hn?"

I'm still waiting for the foretold deaths of print, vinyl LPs, and CDs. Somehow, I believe print will manage to outlive all of these.

its' tempting to think "wow, email is ancient, it's been around for 40-odd years surely web 2.0 etc will supercede it".

And then I remember the telephone, which 120 years later is still going strong.

depends how you define the invention in question or even "dead".

with voip and mobile phones are we taking about the same invention? because talking-to-other-people will likely never die. are you calling that the "telephone".

vinyl LP's are not "dead" as in non-existent, 0% adoption, etc, but they are a lot less prevalent than they used to be. cd's too.

what if electronic ink supersedes regular ink in newspapers? is it still "print".

inventions evolve they don't die.

This is tangential, but I drive two of my favourite web apps almost entirely through email (Tripit and Highrise) and a third (Instapaper) quite a bit. I basically live in Instapaper and Highrise, so that's saying something.

I have email literally everywhere and email reminders are still easily the most effective notification system for a bunch of things I've seen.

Anyone else notice all the fields on the comment form are prepopulated on that page with a guy called "Brian Armstrong"? I didn't put them there and this isn't a shared browser.. WordPress vulnerability?

Thanks for pointing this out, it's showing up on my phone too. Will look into it

I should have noted that I was using an iPad. On Safari on the desktop I'm not seeing the issue. Very odd!