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New Forms of Online Communication Spell End of Email Era in Korea

Recent research shows that dramatic chanages in Korea, "huge drop in email usage "

A poll conducted by Chungbuk University computer education professor Lee Ok-hwa on over 2,000 middle, high school and college students in Gyeonggi and Chungcheong provinces in October revealed that more than two-thirds of the respondents said, "I rarely use or don't use e-mail at all."

The same changes can be found around us, too, especially to consumer email users. In a social software session months ago, we ever talked about "Is email dying?" Many ideas were from blogging phenomenon that time. Blog can replace some functions of public sharing in email traffic before. I won't publish one of my blog posts again in email to some friends since they can now aggregate my ideas with RSS. Although some privacy-sensitive information still transferred in email, especially for business users, I think more alternative tools could steal email's role today in the future. Social networking based blogging, for example, could be more flexible to share information in a trust manner. People can easily publish a message to his/her trusted network(may includes hundreds of people) without concernning about the spam. In such case, subscription/publishing model will play. Instead of today's "send/receive" model in email world.

Other tools, including SMS, IM, P2P communications, chould share the body of email... :)