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Email is so old skool

An excellent article from Julian at Seradigm, Email is for old people, contends that the young un's use Bebo/Facebook (and the like) just as much as email - it's just another 'messaging' service to get in touch with their mates. He concludes:
It started to become clear to me that for these teenagers, email is just another messaging function that they access through a browser. They do some of their messaging in Bebo, and some in Hotmail/YahooMail/Gmail. For them, Bebo and txts are what they use to message their friends, and email is what they use begrudgingly when they have to message old people. When these young people start to come into the workplace the implications of this for corporate IT will be very interesting…
(my emphasis)

And he's right, it will be interesting. It will also be messy, loud and cost loads of money as old habits meet new habits and one removes the other.

I also predict that the most technically savy of these young 'uns* will probably end up in the front line of the battle between old skool and new way man - in the IT Department. It's here that the new world will clash head first with the old 'new world' and metaphorical blood will be spilt (costing $$$s and time). People of my age (35+ ... *ahem*) that work within ICT in any way whatsoever generally see themselves as up with the times, leading the fuddy-duddy business to new and exciting pastures where they can do incredible things with acronyms - EIS, BI and even SAAS.

The new 'new world'ers don't understand why the business has to be lead. They look at PC email clients like we old 'new world'ers look at fax. They look at lock-down PCs like we look at closed office doors. They look at txt'ing like we look at online forums. In essence, they live this new world, know no different and look at our 'cool toys' like they look at 80's music videos - with some humour, a slight reverence because "you saw the original, cool!" and a lot of, "Eeeuew, that is so 80's"

Interesting times indeed ... how do you think the 'oldies' in your IT Department will cope?

I leave you with the following video, as you watch monitor your reaction as it will determine which 'new world'er you are:


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* not all are technically savy of course and being young doesn't mean you HAVE to have a Bebo account!

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