There's a long discussion over at Slashdot about the whether not email is for old f@rts.

A lot of good points over there, the most salient of which is that it's not so much a generational thing as a "having a life" thing. Young people have a lot more free time to jabber at each other on IM, but for serious work-related discussions, email will remain essential for a long time (though I'm pushing clients to establish internal corporate blogs for a lot of this kind of discussion, to avoid spam issues, and provide better archiving and organization of topics). Also, with Facebook or other social networking sites, you're limiting yourself to other Facebook members.

[Update in the afternoon]

Speaking of Facebook, as someone who has signed up, but not figured out why, what is a "friend" in Spacebook terms? What are the implications of it?

Youre kidding right? not only are you talking complete twat (Greek Democracy is from 500 BC) but your article gives me absolutely no insight to why the world should thank the US.

You've obviously managed to post your comment on the wrong thread, but I'll answer you here anyway.

Ancient Greece had democracy (if you happened to be male, and hadn't been enslaved, or born to a barbarian mother, and so on.)

More recently, Greece has had a series of governments, some democratic, some not.

Check out the Wikipedia entry for more details.

instead of blogs, my company has chosen to implement a wiki as (one of ) internal communications board. it started out neat, but without proper oversight IMO it has degraded into a write-only dump with thousands of pages, that nobody ever bothers to read, unless explicitly asked to.
its searchble though, which is good.

You could do both. Blogs are for discussing things, and wikis are for developing policies and procedures, and controlled documents (we used one very successfully for a proposal).

Every time Yahoo updates my on-line software, I have to go in and turn Messenger off.

I don't need it and I don't want it. The only thing I've ever gotten through Messenger was spam of the lonely hearts or soft porn variety.

Others may find it useful, but I don't.

In my line of work, IM is essential for communicating with offshore resources - the alternatives would be either keeping a teleconference bridge open all the time and literally yelling for help, or sending an e-mail which might not be answered for hours (or until the next day). In general, IMs and text pages provide excellent media for responsiveness that are less intrusive (and effort-intensive) than phone calls but more urgent than e-mail.

I may be an old fogey to the extent that I am reluctant to communicate with friends via IM - I could count the number of non-work-related chats I've had in the past 3-4 years without running out of fingers.

well, I use facebook as a sort of rolodex of everyone I know, as it generally contains fairly up to date email addresses and contact info. I pretty much friend anyone I know, even though in terms of who is actually people I consider friends that I want to hang out with and such, its probably about only a third of my contacts.