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Good old-fashioned e-mail hits 40 ... but can it survive? ; It has revolutionised the way we work and communicate. But 40 years after the first... [Western Mail (Wales)]
[June 08, 2011]

Good old-fashioned e-mail hits 40 ... but can it survive? ; It has revolutionised the way we work and communicate. But 40 years after the first... [Western Mail (Wales)]


(Western Mail (Wales) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Good old-fashioned e-mail hits 40 ... but can it survive? ; It has revolutionised the way we work and communicate. But 40 years after the first electronic mail was sent Darren Devine asks whether we will still be e-mailing in another four decades' time FOUR decades ago Ray Tomlinson sent a meaningless series of letters that read something like "QWERTYUIOP" from one computer to another next to it in the same office.



At the time it was a development significant only to Mr Tomlinson and a handful of computer programmer colleagues working for US- based BBN Technologies.

The then 30-year-old Amsterdam-born MIT graduate had such little expectation for his creation that he did not even keep the first message.


Computer experts could already pass messages between people accessing files on one computer and few realised at the time that Mr Tomlinson's development of a small, 200-line-long programme that allowed messages to be sent between different machines would later take on a huge symbolic importance.

One of the enduring legacies of his innovation is the @ symbol that he used to create an address and is now used by billions across the world.

As he himself later remarked, his work was itself unremarkable. It built on the work of others and was only a step towards the creation of the modern e-mail programmes that we depend on today.

"Any single development is stepping on the heels of the previous one and is so closely followed by the next that most advances are obscured. I think that few individuals will be remembered," he said.

Yet because of its symbolic importance and its inclusion of a symbol that has become one of the defining images of the modern era of communications, Tomlinson's name has endured.

First it was only a few hundred in the military who used e-mail, yet within a decade commercial programmes that could store and archive messages had developed the business potential of the idea and it was poised to take off.

By the early '90s, the development of personal computers, the Windows operating system and the Netscape internet browser had opened up web-based e-mail programmes like Hotmail to millions across the world.

Where web pioneers once trod, businesses, personal users, marketing firms, con artists, advertisers and spammers moved in and colonised.

E-mail is now used to advertise everything from penis extensions to mysterious "well-paid part-time jobs" to anyone over 21 and UK- based.

Yet, like everything in the fast-moving world of technology, some are now beginning to question if e-mail too is not reaching its sell- by date.

Social networking sites like Facebook have taken much traffic away from e-mail applications and Twitter, instant messaging programmes and online telephone applications like Skype offer quicker and more advanced ways of communicating.

How long before our e-mail accounts become almost as redundant as the hardly-everused fax machines gathering dust in the corner of the office? Future technologies lecturer Dr Mike Reddy believes e-mail is here to stay because one of its advantages is that it is slower than instantaneous rivals like Twitter.

The academic, from the University of Wales Newport, said: "If I post something on Twitter, in a few days or weeks' time no-one will be able to get back to that and it will have gone because of all the messages that would have been sent since.

"Some of e-mail's uses will go away and be used by other technologies like Twitter or instant messaging (IM).

"But one of the beauties of e-mail is that no-one expects, necessarily, an instant response.

"Sending an email to someone is like sending a letter - there's an expectation that there may be some delay because people are not necessarily going to read it straight away.

"Because there's not an expectation of an instant response you can say, 'OK I'm going to deal with that e-mail tomorrow - I'm going to read it now and respond to it tomorrow'." The academic believes there are already signs that eventually e- mail, Twitter and Facebook will evolve into an almost unified "communication hub".

He added: "What might happen is that it (e-mail) might be more embedded within other communications technologies.

"With the Windows Phone 7.5, or Mango as they're calling it, Microsoft are talking about the idea of integrating various different sources so you'd have one communication hub.

"This would be information that has come in for you and if it was an e-mail you'd send it via e-mail, but if it was a Twitter account you'd send it via Twitter direct messaging.

"But you wouldn't necessarily see it as e-mail as compared with Twitter - it would just be a message that has come in." California-based market researchers Radicati say the number of worldwide e-mail accounts is expected to increase from 3.1bn in 2011 to 4.1bn in 2015 - an average growth rate of 7%.

Around 75% of e-mail addresses are advertisingfunded web-based accounts like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, with the remaining 25% being corporate facilities.

Now business users send and receive around 105 e-mails each day and despite spam filters around 19% of messages are unwanted, including graymail like newsletters.

The development of social networking and IM sites like MSN and AOL has seen a slowing-down in the growth in the number of e-mails sent and received each day.

In 2011 the number of IM accounts stands at 2.6bn, but is expected to grow by 11% a year to 3.8bn in 2015.

Similarly the number of us using sites like Facebook and Twitter is expected to grow from its current 2.4bn to 3.9bn by the end of 2015.

So where does all this leave good old-fashioned e-mail? Psychologist Tom Stewart, whose London firm System Concepts tests new technologies, believes decades on electronic messaging will survive, but more likely through instant messaging and social networking than e-mail.

"They'll all continue to increase (social networking and instant messaging) and probably (at the expense of e-mail) because it will do the same job in some cases." (c) 2011 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved.

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