The nostalgia machine, or kids today!

This Slate article about the "Death of Email" has been approvingly linked from a few different places — Fred Wilson being one, Thomas Hawk being another.

A few unrelated thoughts:

1. If you substituted "email" every time the author references IM and Facebook, and "letters" for email, you might have read this exact same article in 1997.

[Email is] best-suited for longer musings. As opposed to instant messaging, e-mail provides the breathing room to contemplate what we're writing and express nuanced thoughts. A well-tended e-mail inbox and outbox can serve as a sort of diary, an evolving record of your curiosities, obsessions, introspections, apologies, and heart-to-hearts….. While IMs and text messages have a throwaway quality, e-mail is for the sentimental. I still have some of the first flirtatious e-mails I exchanged with my wife in college. I have thoughtful monologues from friends in the midst of crises. I have e-mails from my parents that I envision showing to my children someday.

Haven't we been treated to a raft of articles over the last ten years complaining that email will be the death of thought, spelling, grammar and all civilized communication between adults? (Yes, we have — I'm just too lazy to Google for them right now.) And suddenly, thanks to the emergence of Facebook, Twitter and SMS, email has become the last vestige against the barbarian hordes who can only grunt into an 140-character SMS box? A veritable golden age of elegant correspondence? I think we in the tech industry forget our history too easily.

2. Why does no one seem to understand that these media (email, IM, twitter, Facebook) are good for totally different things? Email is good for one-to-one, private, asynchronous communication. IM and SMS are good for one-to-one, private synchronous communication. Facebook is best for many-to-many, public, asynchronous communication. And Twitter excels as many-to-many. public synchronous communication. See, I made a little table:

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.datatable th { padding:5px 15px; background-color:#efefef; text-align:left; }

* As far as I'm concerned, direct messaging on Twitter is functionally the same as SMS or IM.

So why all the hand-wringing about one channel replacing another? Just use the right tool for the occasion.

3. This is not a new complaint, I hate applications that send email to let me know that "Bob has sent you a message", forcing me to visit the website to see the message. It's inelegant, annoying and wasteful. It's a feature that has been deliberately broken in order to support the needs to an insufficiently evolved business model.

If you're building an app that uses email, then do it right. Don't trick me into coming back to your site. Don't piss me off just to get one more worthless page view. Give me information I need in the email, and then give me a good reason to come back to your site.

And if you're a Facebook user, for example, don't use Facebook to send me a private message. My real email is right there. Use the right tool for the job.

P.S. Two blog posts in one day? I know! What's up with that?