Email: Killer App of the '80's to Killed App in the '00's.

It is amazing the generational shift that can occur in a short 20 years. A kid sitting by himself in a tree used to be a lonely sight. These days a kid sitting in a tree with a cell phone could be in the midst of a multi-person discussion and be happy as a lark. And just as easily, that conversation could be with friends across town, country or the world. And it is highly unlikely that he’s using email to communicate with his friends.

This continued change in technology use reflects the ongoing change in attitude towards real-time communications and shared experiences that has been a steady trend since the 1980’s. The difference is the technology is now closer to delivering on what users have wanted. What they have REALLY wanted.

Communications has traditionally been point to point – location to location and textual in nature. Letters or telegrams were sent from one address to another, whether or not the intended recipient was actually there and could take days or weeks to reach their destination. The telephone was a major improvement to letters as a form of communication as it added the immediacy of real time communication in addition to conveying verbal clues. However, it was still location to location and was not very good at data exchange. Faxing followed but was limited to sharing of print text and diagrams.

Once information became digitized Email became the killer app that took remote communications to the next level and moved business along faster and across borders. Emails boasts near real time communications with file sharing and, with the advent of more ubiquitous access networks, is relatively location independent. It also had the benefit of allowing non-real time communication and thus works well across multiple time zones and with multiple recipients. The problem is that email can be cumbersome, slow and has too much program overhead for today’s non-boomer population. Not to mention the SPAM issue.

And as the boomer generation ages, eyesight becomes an increasing problem, making the reading of verbose email on smaller and smaller screens more problematic.

The Post-Boomer generations frequently exercise the option to choose the ‘best’ technology (what they would see as a service) for the way they want to communicate. For many people, email is used to communicate with friends overseas (to avoid high TXT charges and to better manage the time zone differences) while TXT/IM is for friends more readily available and is the preferred method of real time communications.