Kids Say Email is Dead

An anonymous reader writes "'E-mail is, like, soooo dead' is the headline at News.com, where a piece looks at youth attitudes towards communication mediums. A group of teenage internet business entrepreneurs confessed that they really only use email to 'talk to adults'. Primarily, these folks are using social networks to communicate. 'More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging. Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old founder and president of MyYearbook.com, was the lone teen entrepreneur who said she still uses e-mail regularly to keep up with camp friends or business relationships. Still, that usage pales in comparison to her habit of text messaging. She said she sends a thousand text messages a month.'"

Re:Real Reason Kids Use Text Messaging...

[grazzy]

Wrong, here in sweden (a country with VERY high ratio of text messages sent to spoken minutes on the phone) a SMS is around 14 cents, but talking on the phone for a minute is about the same.

What is the cheapest? Certainly not sending 120 characters versus the communication time you get for the correpsonding call time.

Re:I think many of them

[bdraschk]

No way. MMS is very similar to email, but SMS is SS7-based, which is as weird a protocol as only the telco types could come up with.

Re:Not if today's kids are like I was.

[nacturation]

Moreover, employers don't really care if you e-mail your friends from your account, provided you're not taking the piss. In contrast, browsing social networking sites from work can get you sacked.

Strange policy your employer has. I've never sent a personal email from my company account, nor have I ever made a personal phone call from a company phone. Unless I've given them a business card, my friends and family don't even know how to contact me at work. And why should they? I have a cell phone for personal calls and I use gmail for personal email. Do you really want your personal emails archived along with every other corporate email in perpetuity? So the next time the company is issued a court order to produce a log of emails, all your personal junk is in there too and made public record for anyone to see?
 

Re:Not if today's kids are like I was.

[Firethorn]

nor have I ever made a personal phone call from a company phone.

You've never called your significant other that you're going to be late? You've never called up your insurance agent from work? Made an appointment with your doctor?

Most employers don't mind a little bit - but when it takes hours out of your day, then it becomes an issue. Other than that, the occasional phone call to get an issue sorted out can result in an employee who's not obsessing over it, thus being a happier and more productive worker.

Because of spam?

[FridayBob]

Earlier this year, I discussed this matter with a 16-year-old girl. She said she preferred IM (MSN) over SMTP, because any email account she used would quickly get overloaded with spam. Many of us have different ways of dealing with that problem, but her solution was simply to never use the same email account for too long if she had to use it, and preferably not to use it at all. I suspect that this is not the only reason why she and her friends don't like to use email, but by itself spam seems like a valid complaint.

Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc.

[beyondkaoru]

connecting through ssl doesn't make email more secure; it can be messed with by your mailserver, the mailserver of whoever you're talking to, or anyone in between those. the usefulness of ssl or ssh is that it is more difficult for me to read/modify your mail/password (i have to hack a server as opposed to optionally controlling a router).

gpg really is what makes it secure. still, ssl is a plus. strangely gmail defaults to having it off... weird. and they don't do imap, which makes me sad.

but anyway, the whole social network thing largely exists so that the owners of those servers get to read your messages -- and let future employers, etc, read them too, for a fee. and they don't really do much that people couldn't set up on their own (like, have everyone make an rss feed of their life and aggregate it, is an example).

Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc.

[superphreak]

Seems you're a bit behind the times. I had heard about AOL/ICQ, but I don't use either much, so I looked it up: Since 2000, ICQ and AIM users are able to add each other to their contact list without the need of any external clients.[2] (wikipedia: ICQ)
I know Y!/MSN can IM each other because I've done it.
2 Accounts. Thank you. Next! :P

Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc.

[It'sYerMam]

Let me guess, you're a reseller for t0p qu4l1ty c14lis?