That's a shame. There's plenty of potential in email that's yet to be explored. Gmail was a great step ahead 10 years ago but it hasn't kept pace. Deep integration of email with web has yet to happen.
I doubt this is the end of Facebook trying email. With WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger they own the major alternative to SMS. WhatsApp is going to be launching voice support in Q2 meaning Facebook will own a large portion of voice calls. The only major communications left out are email. Unless their thought is 'email is dead' they will come back with a better product eventually, it's too big a hole to leave.
I don't have data, but I'm pretty sure email is all but irrelevant as a social tool from a today's teenager's perspective - something that "only old people use". I'm 29 and it's been years since I've sent a casual email to a friend...
Meanwhile, I send emails to my friends regularly. We live in different timezones/countries/..., and coordinating times for chat is difficult, so we end up exchanging emails every few weeks. Often, these emails contain multiple kilobytes of text, with snipped context to remind me of what the last topic was, fairly long descriptions of events, etc.
Even for the people I share a house with, we found that email with a mailing list is the most effective way to post notifications to everyone, send reminders, etc.
I haven't come across a serious rival to email for those use cases.
But teenagers are no longer Facebook's core market. Teenagers are using Snapchat and other services like Instagram and WhatsApp more (that's why Facebook is buying them). Email still matters to people who started using Facebook as teenagers 10 years ago when email was still important.
Email is and continues to be important to many to receive a paycheck. I'm very quick to scold clients and other professionals I interact with who send me texts instead of email. I can see email being supplanted by tools like Basecamp, however, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook start to go in that direction ("Facebook for the enterprise")
> I'm 29 and it's been years since I've sent a casual email to a friend...
I've noticed the same thing. I exchange emails with a few friends, but it's generally only to swap links for a "read later" purpose (if it was "read now", they'd be sent over xmpp).
Since we're using personal perspectives without data, I'm 40 and haven't used email for that purpose for years as well. I think it's just a part of the cycle of stuff we use for whatever reasons.
Email in the current form has declining value today, but there's plenty of potential for innovation in email. Those claiming it to be irrelevant are simply twisting & sensationalizing the above fact.
