Over the past few weeks, I started to notice something unusual. I haven’t been getting much emails in my inbox(gmail and yahoo) from my friends. Most of the emails I got were newsletters or alerts related to some payments.Soon I realised that this has been the case for quite a long time. Did it mean that, in this era of constant connectivity, I was rarely communicating with anyone? That didn’t sound right.

As I pondered over this, I realised that my friends and I rarely use emails anymore, but communicate through other means – google talk, Yahoo and Facebook chat, Orkut scraps and Facebook wall posts, Linkedin and Facebook messaging, not to forget Twitter. Does it all mean that the dominiant era of personal emails is over? Is the email, which was such a novelty only 10 years back, already facing obsolescence?

Wall Street Journal(WSJ) thinks so. In a recent article, WSJ declares that ” Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. ” The article talks about the easier and faster means of communication and how these are impacting email. It also compares the communication by “emails” and that by Google “Wave“. The article asks the question whether the faster means of communication is saving us time. It ends like this –

” You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.” How true!!!

So, will we soon see the death of personal emails? Will we one day say “Email, the dinosaur”? Quite possible.

PS: I came across this media count that shows the dynamism of the social web.