With the launch of Facebook's new modern messaging system this week, Founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested that email would soon become obsolete.
We all know that Facebook has taken over the world, but whether this means that email is dead, is certainly debateable. Personally, I can’t imagine business men sending messages over Facebook to overseas clients, let alone colleagues in office environments sending similar messages - unless it's to moan about their job!
Email has come a long way from the first ever message sent by computer programmer, Ray Tomlinson, in 1971, and I don't think many people are ready to say goodbye to our favourite form of contact. Telephones maybe dead, but email? Not yet my friends and here's why:
Technology researchers, Radicati, predict that the number of worldwide email accounts will increase from 3.1 billion in 2011 to 4.1 billion by 2015. This suggests that email is still growing and evolving at a faster rate that social media messaging formats.
Furthermore, Nathaniel Borenstein, co-creator of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol - which is the platform that allows emails to contain attachments, characters, and a whole host of other technological attributes - believes that social network sites such as Facebook and Google+ haven't even come close.
Research suggests that business are using social media platforms more and more, however, this is as a marketing and advertising tool, rather than a communicative one.
Whilst Mr Borenstein and I remain on 'Team Email', it seems that Mark Zuckerberg is not alone in 'Team Social Media'. Lee Bryant, co-founder of Headshift (the world's largest social business consultancy), believes that the relationship between businesses and email is coming to an end.
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Bryant said, "I think fundamentally one of the biggest problems is that social tools communicate slightly more in the open, they create ambient knowledge and ambient awareness for others who are not even in the conversation - Email doesn't do that, it's quite a lonely medium".
However, in my opinion, email is intended to be a more private communicative medium, as subjects such as business deals get discussed - and you wouldn't want your closest competitors to hear about that now, would you?
To balance the debate, it could be argued that new forms of communicative mediums are certainly not a bad thing. When all we had was a pen and paper, that was what we would use, and the same applies for email. Now, with social media in the equation, it has become the 'shiny new penny' that everyone wants to experiment with, which essentially means more knowledge and more communication channels.
For now though, if this were a real boxing match, I would put my money on email, even if it means betting against Mark Zuckerberg!
