The in-between generation
I’m part of the generation caught between email and IM where IM feels more natural but most of the folks just a little older than me refuse to use IM so i’m stuck dealing with email. Today’s teens are stuck between IM, MySpace/Facebook, and SMS. There’s another transition going on which is why there’s no clean one place. IM replaced email for quite a few years but now things are in flux again. Still, no matter what, email is not regaining beloved ground.
I totally hear that. I’m in the same place — I know a wide swath of people who will plan last-minute events over email. Not necessarily because it’s familiar, but because the majority of the recipients have only bought in to email and haven’t gone further by using IM more frequently, or something more elaborate/specific (such as broadcast SMS services).
I’m still an early adopter in general, which is why I have so many fracking web 2.0 accounts — take my recent integration of Twitter on the home page as a point of reference — so for each service I try, I have maybe zero-to-one legitimate friends on average that use it or are even slightly interested in it.
A certain aspect of this shift has to do with choice overload, which is what the market is currently applying. It’s gotten to the point that the differentiations between the online services and the web services are so small and so niche that in many cases people don’t choose to migrate to a new system because they clearly don’t know which one to switch to. In addition, the network effect is necessary for any one system to be useful, and new services don’t have that benefit because all systems so far, aside from these older executions like email and SMS, have been terribly closed.
And yet let’s remember that there are still many email addresses that are not true email accounts, and that cross-carrier SMS is still only a recent development (around 2002 or so).
When service providers (phone, web, it doesn’t matter) choose interoperability over walled gardens, it’s usually a win for everyone. If there was one wish I could have in this field, it’s that some sort of interoperability layer could be developed for friend-networks — some sort of XFN + RDF + RPC on steroids — so that perhaps using either MySpace or Friendster would analogous to using either Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. They’d both have their positives and negatives, and I can still send messages to people who don’t use the same domain names.
One can dream, can’t one?
