Josh Porter: Social Networks Are Killing Email

From Josh Porter:

[S]o many students use chatting tools and social networking sites that [Michigan State University] is even considering phasing out the #1 internet tool of the last 30 years: email accounts. Because students are online all the time and messaging through other means, there is little need for personal, school-based email accounts. Everybody simply uses the built-in tools in the virtual spaces they inhabit...

This is a profound change in the way we use the Web and build software. Email is now a commodity feature: we can almost assume that we’ll always have some sort of messaging system no matter what software we use. Messaging puts the social in social software... [Emphasis in original]

I've heard this phenomenon discussed elsewhere, but something about Josh's framing caused me to think about it from the perspective of attention. If younger users' attention is slowly but surely shifting from email to messaging and other embedded communications tools, we're going to have much better integration between our communication-related attention data and the data generated by our other online activities. And we'll experience our interpersonal communications in the context of those other activities--reading articles and posts, listening to music and podcasts, watching videos, shopping and other commercial transactions. I have more questions than answers, but I'm intrigued by the implications.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data josh+porter