I hope you read that rather than hearing it. Following on from an article yesterday about the nuisance value of being distracted by email, today IT Donut has published an article predicting the death of email. The most interesting point for me is made in the opening paragraph:

email hasn’t changed for 20 years, and we all know what happens to technology that doesn’t change. It dies.

This very point was made in a Forbes article last week, looking at why and how the three generations of internet have each given way to the next. Within my own experience, the younger generation view email as the the equivalent of snail mail. It’s dull and slow, taking at least a nanosecond to arrive, in which time they’ve updated their Facebook status and fired off 20 BBMs. Or maybe not – bearing out the Forbes article precisely, I know many people who are going off Facebook, some going to the extreme of deleting their account tho as we know, Facebook is the data that will not die.

Interesting points are made in the rather pro-Windows article – as the author fleetingly confesses, other instant messaging clients are available. We use Empathy. I quote:

Empathy is a messaging program which supports text, voice, and video chat and file transfers over many different protocols. You can tell it about your accounts on all those services and do all your chatting within one application.

Easy peasy. Like a Windows program but better, much, much better.