电子邮件的时代是否已经过去

电子邮件作为通信之王经历了飞速发展。不过它的统治时代已经终结。

新一代服务开始取而代之，比如Twitter、Facebook和其他无数争着想在新世界中分一杯羹的服务。如同10多年前电子邮件的出现一样，这一转变有望深刻地改写人们通信的方式──以我们刚刚能够开始想像得到的方式。

当然，我们仍会使用电子邮件。不过电子邮件更适合以往人们使用互联网的方式──隔三差五地登录、登出、查看信息。如今，我们总是联着网，无论我们是坐在桌子前还是用手机。这种总是联网的状态产生了一系列新的通信方式，比电子邮件要快的多，也有趣的多。

如果你可以通过及时消息更快地得到答案，为什么还要等待电子邮件回复呢？由于Facebook的出现，有些问题不必问就已经知道答案了。如果一位朋友更新了Facebook上的公开状态，告诉全世界她已经下班了，你就无需再问她了。与目前处于测试阶段的谷歌Wave等服务相比，拖着“附件”的电子邮件看起来要枯燥得多。通过谷歌Wave，用户可以把照片从桌面拖放到Wave中，与别人分享照片，并输入评论。

难怪在电子邮件继续增长之际，其他类型的通信服务却在以更高的速度增长。据尼尔森(Nielsen Co.)的数据，2009年8月，美国、欧洲的几个国家、澳大利亚和巴西有2.769亿电子邮件用户，较2008年8月的2.292亿增长了21%。而社交网站和其他社群网站的用户数量飙升了31%，至3.015亿。

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.