The End of the Email Era - WSJ.com

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By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

"The whole idea of this email service isn't really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks," says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let's start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.

Into the River

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we'd complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren't automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we're nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they're interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

Consider Twitter. The service allows users to send 140-character messages to people who have subscribed to see them, called followers. So instead of sending an email to friends announcing that you just got a new job, you can just tweet it for all the people who have chosen to "follow" you to see. You can create links to particular users in messages by entering @ followed by their user name or send private "direct messages" through the system by typing d and the user name.

Facebook is part of the trend, too. Users post status updates that show up in their friends' "streams." They can also post links to content and comment on it. No in-box required.

Dozens of other companies, from AOL and Yahoo Inc. to start-ups like Yammer Inc., are building products based on the same theme.

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with "a river that continues to flow as you dip into it."

But the speed and ease of communication cut both ways. While making communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half-dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your 500 other "friends." And if you know all these people are reading your updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

Too Much Information

Another obvious downside to the constant stream: It's a constant stream.

That can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages—from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans—being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.

Enter filtering. In email land, consumers can often get by with a few folders, if that. But in the land of the stream, some sort of more sophisticated filtering is a must.

On Facebook, you can choose to see updates only from certain people you add to certain lists. Twitter users have adopted the trend of "tagging" their tweets by topic. So people tweeting about a company may follow their tweet with the # symbol and the company name. A number of software programs filter Tweets by these tags, making it easier to follow a topic.

The combination of more public messages and tagging has cool search and discovery implications. In the old days, people shared photos over email. Now, they post them to Flickr and tag them with their location. That means users can, with little effort, search for an area, down to a street corner, and see photos of the place.

Tagging also is creating the potential for new social movements. Instead of trying to organize people over email, protesters can tweet their messages, tag them with the topic and have them discovered by others interested in the cause. Iranians used that technique to galvanize public opinion during their election protests earlier this year. It was a powerful example of what can happen when messages get unleashed.

Who Are You?

Perhaps the biggest change that these email successors bring is more of a public profile for users. In the email world, you are your name followed by a "dot-com." That's it. In the new messaging world, you have a higher profile, packed with data you want to share and possibly some you don't.

Such a public profile has its pluses and minuses. It can draw the people communicating closer, allowing them to exchange not only text but also all sorts of personal information, even facial cues. You know a lot about the person you are talking to, even before you've ever exchanged a single word.

Take, for example, Facebook. Message someone over the site and, depending on your privacy settings, he may be a click away from your photos and your entire profile, including news articles you have shared and pictures of that party you were at last night. The extra details can help you cut to the chase. If you see that I am in London, you don't need to ask me where I am. They can also make communication feel more personal, restoring some of the intimacy that social-network sites—and email, for that matter—have stripped away. If I have posted to the world that I am in a bad mood, you might try to cheer me up, or at least think twice about bothering me.

Email is trying to compete by helping users roll in more signals about themselves. Yahoo and Google Inc. have launched new profile services that connect to mail accounts. That means just by clicking on a contact, one can see whatever information she has chosen to share through her profile, from her hobbies to her high school.

But a dump of personal data can also turn off the people you are trying to communicate with. If I really just want to know what time the meeting is, I may not care that you have updated your status message to point people to photos of your kids.

Having your identity pegged to communication creates more data to manage and some blurry lines. What's fine for one sort of recipient to know about you may not be acceptable for another. While our growing digital footprints have made it easier for anyone to find personal information about anyone online if they go search for it, new communications tools are marrying that trail of information with the message, making it easier than ever for the recipient to uncover more details.

A Question of Time

Meanwhile, one more big question remains: Will the new services save time, or eat up even more of it?

Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up people.

Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint division, which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails are out of users' in-boxes.

"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."

Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

Mail Volume Expected to Continue Decline; U.S. Postal Service Adapting Services

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 25, 2009

Dorothy and Andrew Yankanich moved into their $18,000 brick rambler in Wheaton in 1966 and soon began what would become a daily ritual: Walking across the street to the squat blue mailbox and dropping off bills, birthday cards, letters, catalogue orders and whatever else needed to be sent on its way. For 43 years, in rain and shine, through the raising of seven children, the friendly box they could see through their front window's lace curtains was always there.

Until, one day at lunchtime a week or so ago, it wasn't. Yankanich, 82, watched as postal workers hacked at the rusted bolts and hauled the box away for good.

Across the country, stalwart blue "collection boxes" like the one on Flack Street in Wheaton are disappearing. In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural routes and suburban neighborhoods -- more than the 175,000 that remain. In the Washington area alone, half the blue boxes that were on the streets nine years ago have been pulled up and taken to warehouses to molt in storage or be sold for scrap, leaving 4,071 mailboxes remaining in the District, Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs.

"It was a nice-looking box," sighed Dorothy Yankanich, 77, looking out on the empty concrete slab across the street. "That was my exercise. Going across the street with the mail every day."

Although some communities have mounted protests -- angry customers in one Maine town planted a snowplow and backhoe in front of a threatened mailbox -- the vanishing boxes are only the most visible sign that something fundamental is changing in the way Americans communicate. The boxes are disappearing because most of us, unlike the Yankaniches, no longer use the mail as we used to.

The U.S. Postal Service says it removes "underperforming" mailboxes -- those that collect fewer than 25 pieces of mail a day -- after a week-long "density test." Snail mail is a dying enterprise because Americans increasingly pay bills online, send Evites for parties and text or give a quick call on a cellphone rather than write a letter.

Combine the impact of new technologies with the gut punch of the recession, and in the past year alone, the Postal Service has seen the single largest drop-off in mail volume in its 234-year history, greater even than the decline from 1929 to 1933 during the Great Depression. That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

The situation is so dire that the Postal Service, which is projecting a $6 billion shortfall by the end of September despite a recent postage rate increase, will go to Congress this month to seek emergency relief, looking to cut home mail delivery from six days a week to five. Already, the Postal Service has cut hours at hundreds of post offices across the country, including 56 of the Washington area's 386 outlets. It has consolidated routes, dropping 158 delivery routes locally, offered workers early retirement and imposed hiring and salary freezes. Still, said Postmaster General John E. Potter, the service is in "acute financial crisis."

"We're like air," said Postal Service spokeswoman Deborah Yackley. "People just take it for granted that we're always going to be there. Well, if you want to keep your collection box, would you mail a letter, please!"

Back when the Yankaniches were courting, the world was different. They met in 1952 at a turnpike diner in Pennsylvania when Andrew Yankanich, a World War II veteran, was on furlough. They knew each other all of two weeks before he shipped out. So they wrote each other while the U.S. Navy sent him around the globe. "That correspondence went on for two years," he said. "You can't imagine how exciting mail call was every time we hit port." On the strength of what they wrote in those letters, the couple married when he returned and have stayed together for 56 years.

Even now, Yankanich buys a stack of cards every month to mail to family and friends with birthdays and anniversaries coming up. He has a computer and could pay his bills online, but Dorothy doesn't know how to. They're the kind of people who have always known their mailman's first name and leave him presents at Christmas.

But other than holiday cards, they rarely get letters anymore. "A lot our age is gone," Dorothy said. And they were the ones who wrote.

It's not just first-class mail that is migrating to the Web. Junk mail -- the bank offers and ads that often make up most of the day's mail -- has fallen precipitously as businesses follow consumers online. "If you go to banks, they will tell you point-blank that their first priority is to get the hell out of the mail," said Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce, a trade organization that represents commercial mailers. "These people already see where the change is going."

The Postal Service is valiantly trying to keep up with the times. Customers can buy stamps at grocery stores or online; the system's Web site lets users print out mailing labels and order boxes that the Postal Service will pick up at your door and ship for one price, regardless of weight. "We want people to say, 'Hey, I can turn my home into a post office,' " said Bob Bernstock, president of mailing and shipping services at the Postal Service. "We need to evolve because the way people are communicating has evolved."

These days, children may receive birthday cards from Grandmom, but rarely send them. If there's any thrill left in the mail, it tends to come from things we order, like movies from Netflix, magazines and stuff we buy online. Internet commerce, once expected to save the post office's future, is an important part of the system's revenue, but comes nowhere near making up for dollars lost from the sheer decline in mail volume.

The mail at most front doors now holds few magical surprises such as letters with an international stamp or scented declarations of love, said Nancy Pope, a curator at the Smithsonian's Postal Museum. "Mail is just not as deeply emotional anymore," she said. "We don't have the 'Oh my God, the mail's here!' moments anymore."

Birth announcements and wedding invitations still lend the mail an air of excitement, but consider this: When Rebecca Brodie, 25, a Fairfax County schoolteacher, mails out 175 invitations to her December wedding, instead of including a response card with an envelope and stamp, she will ask guests to RSVP by e-mail.

"We kind of got a little flak for it from the invitation person," Brodie said. But with lots of international family and grandparents who regularly e-mail, she and her fiance decided to save on postage. "Maybe only five out of the 300 people we're inviting don't use the Internet."

Andrew Yankanich still intends to use the mail. His letter carrier told him he can leave his bills in his personal green plastic mailbox next to his front door and flip up the little red flag. So it's no hardship that they've taken away the blue mailbox across the street. It's just, he says, something he'll miss.

The Way We Live Now - The Overextended Family -

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

I would never have pegged my parents as early adopters. At 79 and 82, they are, like most people their age, blissfully uninterested in technology. To them, a BlackBerry is a late-summer fruit; tweeting is something a bird does. So I was unprepared when they called to tell me about their thrilling new discovery: Skype, an online service we could use to video chat. It’s free, my mom explained, eagerly. All we’d have to do is get something put on our computers (translation: download a program) and they would be able to talk to their 5-year-old granddaughter face to face! We could leave the gizmo on all the time, my dad suggested, and they could watch her go through her day. “Maybe you could bring it to her school,” he added, only half-joking. “We could see her classroom!”

Now, I like my parents. A lot. I really do. That’s why I make the 1,500-mile trip to visit them three or four times a year. I did not, however, spend the bulk of my adult life perfecting the fine art of establishing boundaries only to have them toppled by the click of a mouse. If I wanted them to have unfettered access to my life, I wouldn’t have put the “keep out” sign on my room at age 10. I would have lived at home through college. I would have bought the house next door to them in Minneapolis and made them an extra set of keys.

Even they might have found that a little extreme.

But the mere existence of video chat forces me to lay down a whole new set of rules and to rethink, yet again, the line between inclusive and intrusive, the balance between their yearning to shrink the distance between us and my need for limits — something I thought we resolved decades ago to our mutual satisfaction.

So I did what any sensible adult child would do. I stalled.

“Gee,” I said, “setting that up seems awfully complicated. I’m not sure I’d know how to do it.”

o Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love.

I may curse e-mail for destroying my workday, for turning me into a lab rat on a drug unable to stop clicking on “send-receive.” Yet it has been a godsend in my relationship with my mom: her hearing is severely impaired, much beyond help from aids or amplification, making phone conversations frustrating. E-mail has allowed us to “talk” again more fully, to share complex thoughts and feelings. We sometimes correspond five or six times a day.

Likewise, digital cameras are a boon: the near-instant photos I send to my folks — my daughter’s school play or maiden bicycle voyage — are truly the next-best thing to being there. Each technology strengthens our bond, but each also preserves my privacy. I’m in touch more often than ever before but entirely on my schedule. I manage the flow of information. I set the terms of my self-presentation. Everyone wins.

Apple hints at something similar in one of its “there’s an app for that” iPhone ads, demonstrating how, with the flick of a finger, you can turn an incriminating snapshot into “at least one photo you can show your parents.” The message is that this achieves the elusive balance between access and control in personal communication. But I wonder. Cellphones may be smart, but they’re also tricky. On one hand, you don’t have to answer them if you are, say, in a crowded cafe (and oh so very often, I wish people wouldn’t) but the assumption has become that you will. Depending on your viewpoint, perpetual availability to everyone you know can be a comfort or a shackle, can intensify closeness or subvert it. One of my brothers grabs his cellphone before heading out for his morning run in case his wife or kids want to reach him. My other brother considers that excessive. Let’s just say that it is best to draw the curtain on that dinner-table debate.

The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. Racy photos, amorous texts and nonstop Skyping may be just the thing for lovers who are separated during the giddy days of new romance. At the same time, all that virtual togetherness may overaccelerate a courtship. There is something to be said for the slow burn, for anticipation over immediacy. I’m relieved not to be single in a time when you can flirt, fall in love, sext and break up with a guy without ever so much as meeting for coffee. And, really, what is more erotic, more personal, more potentially vulnerable than handwriting on a page? My husband won my heart by sending a witty postcard from a film shoot in Hawaii. No return address, no way for me to respond at all, let alone instantly in three platforms. These days, it seems, the only time we put pen to paper is when someone has died.

Every evolution in telecommunication has been greeted with ambivalence. Critics of the early telephone warned that eliminating the physical presence from conversation would increase isolation and undermine the family. Picture phones embody the future in dystopian and utopian sci-fi alike: Heywood Floyd uses one in “2001: A Space Odyssey”; ditto George of “The Jetsons.” When AT&T unveiled a test model at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, visitors lined up for a chance to talk to a stranger at Disneyland. Even Lady Bird Johnson gave it a whirl in Washington. In 1970, the picture phone was introduced for commercial use; the product tanked. Part of it was the expense — a three-minute call between New York and Chicago on the original version cost $27. But there was another reason: Who would want callers to know you were leafing through magazines or never made your bed or were trimming your toenails in the all-together? No one, that’s who.

Video chat, while obviously cheaper, would seem to have the same skewed ratio: too much access, too little control. But that’s speaking from the standpoint of a daughter. My perspective shifts significantly — as it does on so many subjects — when I mull this one over as a mother. It’s one thing to consider how much about me my parents have a right to know; it’s another to contemplate how much about my daughter I have a right to know — or even want to know.

I have friends who scroll through their teenagers’ text messages every night. They say it’s for their children’s protection, but to me it just seems the high-tech equivalent of picking the lock on a diary (something I know my mother never did, because if she had, I’d still be grounded). Their children don’t seem to mind the breach of trust. Maybe that’s because privacy is as foreign to them as analog television. Or because they’ve grown up far more tethered than any previous generation to their parents’ watchful gaze. It’s curious that today’s parents, who in their youth were so adamant about their own independence, are so lousy at fostering it in their progeny, even after the children leave home.

When I took off for college, I called my parents once a week, which was standard. They never saw my dorm room, didn’t meet my friends, had no concept of my schedule. It was My Space — the old-fashioned kind. Has cheaper and more plentiful technology made the difference, or is it something else? According to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web site traffic, Skype users typically fall into one or more of four groups: white, male, between 18 and 34, and the “less affluent” — which in this case, probably indicates still in school. It could be such lads Skype only one another, but I doubt it. If they’re indeed checking in with Mom, I hope they at least cover up the beer-pong poster first.

Maybe by the time my daughter leaves for college, I, too, will wish for a 24-hour-a-day video feed (or, by then, perhaps, a continuous holograph). Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll be relieved not to see into her room, not to have to tell her for the 832nd time to clean it up. Maybe I’ll remind myself that magic mirrors are best left back in “Romper Room,” that, at some point, she has to figure out how to be her without me. She will need to cut the invisible cord — the phone cord, that is — and I will have to let her.

Doubtless, if circumstance takes her far away from home, my sense of the distance between us will be different from hers. That measure will change yet again — for both of us — should she have children, as it has, since her birth, for my parents and me. The truth is, I consider their tie to my daughter to be as precious as they do; the technology I use, I realize, may no longer reflect that.

So, I agreed to give video chat a try. We downloaded Skype and set a time to connect. They rang. I answered. My daughter waved. And then . . . we stared at each other. Short silences that seem natural on the phone become terribly awkward on video. Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice. In my concern over letting my parents too far in, creating a claustrophobic closeness, I hadn’t considered that video chat might do just the opposite.

“Um,” I finally admitted, “I don’t have anything to say.”

That was a few weeks ago; we haven’t tried again since. It looks as if we’ll be among the two-thirds of Skype members who, according to Quantcast estimates, are passers-by who use the service no more than once a month.

“I think I’d rather e-mail,” my mom wrote me.

“Me, too,” I shot back, attaching a few photos of kindergarten graduation before hitting “send.”

Her response, which came instantly, made me smile: “Oh, Pegs,” she wrote. “Thanks so much for the pictures. It was exactly as if we were there with you!”

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy,” a memoir.