Social Web and E-mail

From GigaOm this morning, "The Social Web Prays at Email’s Altar."

Every so often a new technology comes along, promising to revolutionize the world of communications. And in the end, it prays at the altar of email. Despite being messy and unstructured, email, which will turn 50 in a couple of years, remains the hub of our Internet experience.

Take this morning — I opened my inbox to find a dozen Twitter direct messages and a few replies to my posts on FriendFeed which, in turn, I replied to via email, Google Reader alerts (with links shared by my network), and a barrage of Facebook messages (pokes, new friends, etc.) This morning, Facebook was on my bad side because for some odd reason, I received an email saying the settings for what I want (only events-related information) had changed. I wasn’t sure how or why, but that happens. I grumbled a little, shook my fist at the Facebook gods, and then went back to change my settings.

Why do I love this so much? Because I went into a really similar rant just two months ago:

This is about my hub of social networks and how I manage my digital presences.

It isn't Facebook or LinkedIn; it's not Twitter (gasp!), it's even ahead of text messaging, I say this with complete certainty: Gmail is my most social network.

It's the center point of all my other social networks (hence the title of this article). I don't sit on Facebook or TweetDeck all day waiting for a direct message, new follower or a tagged photo, It's all siphoned into this one place, ultimately making it my storehouse for each part of my online networks. Considering that there are times when I'm not in front of a computer (again - gasp!), getting notifications in my e-mail also pushes them to my phone as effectively as a text but without the cost. Amazing, this technology thing.

E-mail very well may be the most important technological innovation since the Walkman telephone. Om Malik quotes a stat in his post from today that there are likely to be 1.9 billion worldwide e-mailers by 2013. A little less than a third of the world, connected by no more than a mainframe. I'm not a anthropologist, so I won't try to dampen that stat with a marginalization of the cultures surrounding the other 4-plus billion people in the world.

Om says a lot of other points that I agree with (especially his mention of Wave, supported by a reader's comment that really cements the ability of the new Google tool to change everything). Take a gander through the whole piece if you have three to seven minutes.

I'll even e-mail it to you, if you'd like.