From Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody, a quote by Merlin Mann:

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a fucking pebble!”

Towards the end of my last full-time job I realized that my email load had grown far beyond the point of being a productive tool (Sherry Turkle called this ‘email bankruptcy‘ when she identified it back in 1999!).
I started an attempt to reorganize my communication channels. Facebook would be for all my non-work related and non-time-sensitive stuff. Twitter and blogging for my ‘only if you have time stuff’ and email strictly for work. Setting up the different accounts is easy, re-training your friends and colleagues to adhere to the new law is the challenge! Still I was relatively successful at diffusing and taming my social (and professional) network.

Gerd Leonhard (who I also plucked the Nielsen chart on the right from), last year, claimed that eMail is for old people:

the Digital Natives the Net Generation, the 10-27 year-olds, don’t use email like we do. For them, emailing means business, parents, government and other unfortunately unavoidable stuff. If they want to communicate (and that means 2-way now), they will twitter each other, leave messages on Facebook or Myspace, Orkut, Cyworld, StudiVZ, Mixi, or subscribe to each other’s blog feeds or follow each other on Friendfeed, or chat on IM, via QQ or talk / video-talk on Skype, or SMS each other.

The web and email changed everything when they went mainstream a decade ago. They’re now on the verge of being usurped. The race to build and dominate the future communication platforms where Metcalfe’s Law winner takes all characteristics may still hold is on (Alternatively, open standards may allow for myriad competing and interoperable connectivity platforms).

Here’s Mark Zuckerburg explaining how Facebook’s future isn’t as a website.

Facebook (not known for its embrace of open standards) is one of the better placed companies to take advantage of the next wave of net access. They need to improve upon their disappointing AIR application (which is mistakenly aimed at being a Twitter-app killer) and their email functionality. (Why not just ape the Google Wave capabilities? A Facebook specialty is to incorporate best of web – FriendFeed, Twitter etc – functionality into its own services)

The web and email changed everything when they went mainstream a decade ago. They’re now on the verge of being usurped.

We’re increasingly connecting to the network and communicating outside of the traditional browser web interface and email.
Apple iPhone users use apps, Tweeters use TweetDeck and Twhirl (both based on Adobe‘s AIR platform) or SMS, Kindles access blogs and media sites direct, Blogs, Skype, IM – all of these services are fragmenting our net access.

None of these ideas are new.
Wikipedia on “Web 2.0“:

The term was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999. In her article “Fragmented Future,” she writes
The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. … The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] and maybe even your microwave.

But I sense the reality is finally catching up with the ideas.

Update (#iranelection): A timely TED Talk by Clay on How Twitter can make history:

Clay takes some specific Iran and Twitter questions.