Ottawa Rambler

“You’ve got mail!”

A phrase that was so ubiquitous back in the late 90’s, when America On Line and dial-up internet were king.  How times have changed for the once internet giant, and for that matter, email itself.

Oh, email isn’t going to die, its a venerable stalwart as old as the internet itself, but its been continually supplanted as the dominant form of communication on the internet since the tech boom of the new millennium.   First instant messaging came along (IMing), then blogs, then facebook and now twitter seems to be king.   A disclosure right now, other than this blog, I am not on “the twitter” or “the facebook” or big on web 2.0 in general.

My dislike of those services stems not from their usefulness, but more from their business model that is predicated on my lack of privacy.  Privacy being a commodity today’s youth sadly take for granted.  I mean there is nothing that facebook does that email cannot do.  I want to send a broadcast out to all, I use the cc field.  Post pictures to a gallery, I can attach a file and send.  Meet someone new, randomly relpy to an unknown person on a cc list in a chain email I get.  Ok that last one I would never do.

Facebook does make all of those things easier and provides a much better experience while doing so.  The other big thing is the “interconnectedness” of it all.  Ccc’ing excepted, email is very much one to one communication, very directed.  Facebook just kind of displays everything at once.

Twitter, though, I do not know what the fascination is with it.   Its not unlike a blog, though with a 140 character limit per post, that gets broadcast to your “followers”.

Perhaps I am just getting old, and I am no longer with “it” anymore.

Yet, ironically enough, I wear a shirt from the Pure Pwnage crew that says “I pwn noobs”.  No one knows what pwn means.  No one knows what noobs means.  So I have to explain it to even older coworkers.  Though I have trouble keeping up with the slang now used.  At least I know what it means in context, the terms epic fail, fail (see this NYT Magazine story), ftw (for the win), win, and other stuff.

Its maddening to keep up with it all.