SAN FRANSISCO: Signs you’re an old fogey: You still watch movies on a VCR, listen to vinyl records and shoot photos on film. And you enjoy using email.
Young people, of course, much prefer online chats and text messages. These have been on the rise for years but are now threatening to eclipse email, much as they have already superseded phone calls. Internet companies like Facebook are responding with message services focused on immediate gratification.
The problem with email, young people say, is that it involves a boringly long process of signing into an account, typing out a subject line and then sending a message that might not be received or answered for hours. And sign-offs like “sincerely” — seriously?
Facebook is trying to appeal to the youth of the world. It is rolling out a revamped messaging service that is intended to feel less like email and more like texting. The company decided to eliminate the subject line on messages after its research showed that it was most commonly left blank or used for an uninformative “hi” .
Facebook also killed the “cc” and “bcc” lines. And hitting the enter key can immediately fire off the message, à la instant messaging, instead of creating a new paragraph. The changes, company executives say, leave behind time-consuming formalities that separate users from what they crave: instant conversation.
“The future of messaging is more real time, more conversational and more casual,” said Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering at Facebook , where he oversees communications tools. “The medium isn’t the message. The message is the message.”
The numbers testify to the trend. The number of total unique visitors in the United States to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail is now in steady decline, according to the research company comScore. Such visits peaked in November 2009 and have since slid 6%; visits among 12- to 17-year-olds fell around 18%.
The slide in email doesn’t reflect a drop in digital communication; people have gravitated to instant messaging, texting and Facebook. James E Katz, director for Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University , said this wasn’t death of email but a downgrade , thanks to greater choice.