More Old Fogie Discussion

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?