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Where were you when you first found out about e-mail? To many people in irs help late 1990's, e-mail was the greatest thing since sliced bread. You could send written messages to people halfway across the world at no cost, and your message would get there within minutes. Whole new realms of possibility emerged. Unfortunately, this quickly became as much a liability as it was an asset. Spam was born, and so was information glut. Friends and family members began forwarding every remotely funny or interesting e-mail to everybody they knew, since it was easy and didn't cost anything. This was fun for awhile, but soon it became a nuisance. You probably have someone in your family who became notorious for passing along every joke, poem, political rant, or cartoon, including the ones that had already been around several times. You've most likely noticed that this got old before long.

E-mail has gone through the marvel-to-monster cycle several times now. It's conditioned people to have a high degree of pickiness and a short attention span. In other words, most people are less likely to forward e-mails than they were several years ago, and the recipients are less likely to read them. In the business context, the same basic problem has happened. Companies were thrilled at the bottom-line savings that resulted from sending memos electronically instead of printing them on paper, and they also benefited in a big way from the ability to streamline communication across long distances. At the same time, it became a burden on people's time. The cost of sending memos was nill, so mailing lists grew bigger and bigger. This caused inboxes to overflow, and productivity suffered as people began to spend more and more time sorting through e-mails about information they didn't really need. Managers with a severe case of e-mail glut would periodically delete everything in their inbox, under the assumption that important messages would be sent again. As a result, messages were dropped and communication broke down, especially when people relied solely on e-mail.

For these reasons, people are moving away from e-mail and into more focused, permission-based means of life insurance settlements For example, Twitter allows users to "follow" each other's postings, which are limited to 140 characters of text. In this way, it's now possible to send a broadcast message to everyone who has asked to hear from you, but your message has to be short and to the point. If you abuse this and send people spam or irrelevant information, they can stop listening to you at any time. Twhirl, a piece of companion software that accompanies the service, allows real-time communication via Twitter. Twhirl notifies a user when someone in his or her network sends a posting, known as a "tweet." This is just one example of how more powerful and efficient tools have the capacity to move communication out of the e-mail realm. Other examples include Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and del.icio.us. That's just a few and there are many more.

E-mail still serves a purpose. But you can expect to be using it less and less. The way things are going, it may become totally obsolete.

Dave Baldwin is a staunch introvert who hung up his technical hat in 2007 in pursuit of his entrepreneurial dreams. He is known in the community of Raleigh, NC as "The Introverted Entrepreneur." He is committed to car insurannce a "play for a living" business culture where every single individual enjoys the lifestyle of an entrepreneur.

Baldwin got his first experience in sales and marketing in 2002, when he took his first summer sales job selling kitchen cutlery. It was during those formative lessons that he began to see his own potential for entrepreneurship. His recent layoff from a manufacturing job had shown him what it meant to be at the mercy of someone else for survival, and he had decided never to put himself in this position again.

Baldwin is currently living in Raleigh, NC, and involved with several startup businesses including two MLM companies. He enjoys writing and painting in his spare time, and plans one day to resume playing the piano. For further reading, see his professional network marketing blog: www.HighClassNetworkMarketing.comwww.HighClassNetworkMarketing.com