Broadband ISP TalkTalk ( The Carphone Warehouse ) has predicted that email could "die out ... in the next 10 years" because younger Internet users are increasingly switching to using Instant Messaging (IM) and Twitter style services to communicate. It probably doesn't help that email is still being SPAMMED (junk mail) to death, with nearly 9 in 10 messages being rubbish.

TalkTalk's research, which was conducted with a social anthropologist from the University of Kent, also found that Britain has over 2 million “First Lifers” – those in their late teens or early 20s – who are tech savvy but don’t like being stuck at a desk.

For First Lifers, email is going out of style – and fast. Barely half (51%) regularly use email anymore, with many young people instead opting for shorter communications like Twitter and Facebook updates to keep in the loop, supplemented by text messages, instant messaging when they’re out and about.

The so called First Lifers apparently prefer these technologies as they enable them to contact whole groups of friends rather than individuals one at a time. So are we to assume that the simple concept of a CC has gone totally unnoticed? Contacting multiple people at one time has always been a critical function of email.


Ironically all of these services still required a working email address before you can register the account :tongue: , but nobody seems to have considered that. So in actual fact we think that email will still be very necessary, especially for administrative (as above) tasks and in businesses. However we do agree that it is definitely less and less likely to be a front line service.