I think if there was a “professional” version of Facebook style communication (where only mutually agreed upon friends can speak to one another), then email as we know it today will become obsolete. In essence, I think email needs to be redefined to give the receiver control over who can sent them messages.

BTW, I too use pobox.com and highly recommend it. Whenever my local provider account gets too much spam, I just create a new account and use it. Pobox ensures that my friends can still reach me, since that is the address I give out. What’s cool about Facebook is long lost friends are now reconnecting with me. The pictures help them ensure that they are reaching out to the correct person.

Kids dont use email because they dont work in companies. They use SMS because it appears to them to be cheaper. When they are working, this may all change. There is a role for email.

One bonus I’ve noticed from this is that the spamcatcher email has almost come to personify my personal presence on the internet. Here’s all the companies I’ve dealt with, all the sites (LJ, Flickr, RSS feeds, etc.) I’ve ever interacted with. It’s even the email I use for posting to blogs like this one. It’s not that I’m trying to hide, but going off of the general rule that I don’t give my email address to anyone I haven’t talked to in person, it provides an extra buffer of sorts. If I start collaborating with someone on the Internet, and I need to check daily to see if there’s an email from them, I’ll give them my personal email. It’s a little extra work, but it’s one way of doing things. And, since I’m a shameless cheapskate, I appreciate that it’s free.

What I’m very slowly trying to get to is that, just as we still have “snail mail” and real life P.O. Boxes and fax machines and such, I imagine we’ll still have email for a good long time, mainly because it’s a very simple technology that’s hard to replace. You still need snail mail to send certain types of formal correspondences, packages, birthday cards, etc. P.O. Boxes do the same thing, except with an extra degree of distance as it’s digital counterpart. We could scan documents and email them, but faxing is still simpler, even if some picture quality is sacrificed–and it means not having to go out and buy a scanner. For the same reasons, email will probably live on. Now, we may stop getting our email accounts from Yahoo and Gmail and Hotmail and whatever the trendy sites are these days, and start getting them from Verizon and Palm and the like. People who use Comcast, I know, already get Comcast email accounts, and the same may apply to our cell phones and palm pilots and MP3 players, though all of these are already beginning to merge.

Hardware changes, and changes often. You can merge your phone, music player, personal organizer, computer, e-book reader and 4-slot toaster as much as you like, and what the final product is may be recognizable, or it may not. Email has its competition–text messaging, for instance. There are programs like Pinger that let you use your cell phone to leave an audio email message. There are voice emails and video emails and all manner of varieties. But regardless of what the medium is and whether you’re typing, thumbing, writing with a stylus, speaking, miming or signing, it all needs a place to go. It could go to your phone number, true. But just as we hate to go to the mailbox because we know it’s all going to be junk mail, we go. We still get magazines and letters and the like. The strength of email is that it’s modeled after a VERY resilient concept–mail.

Now, on the other hand, just as we dread what the mailbox may hold, we hate picking up the phone at dinner, because we’re sure it’s someone asking if we’re willing to take a short survey or the like. It’s audio junk mail, audio spam, and Skype and it’s many VOIP-style cousins are ways of getting around it. Maybe this means it’s better, maybe it’s just that the telemarketers haven’t expanded that far yet. We shall see.

Thus, we’re left with two resilient technologies: email and phone. (Mail too, but let’s stick to electronic things for a second.) As email expands to audio and phones expand to text, what we may be seeing is the beginning of a truly impressive merger. After all, is sending a message (text, audio, video, etc.) to Emailaddress@TheInternet.com much different than sending a message (text, audio, video, etc.) to 123-456-7890? Probably not. We may call it pmail or something like that, but whatever we do call it, we’ll recognize where it came from.

Whatever does happen, we can be sure of one thing, and one thing only: Students will try to use it in the middle of class.