I am 53 and for me it is just the opposite. I love PM’s
I get up at 04:00 every morning and start logging into forums that I post on. Each one has a different function and it is much easier to keep members straight in my head if I am in sync with where I am.

Even with the best filters, I am still plagued with spam and crap e-mails.
I spend way too much time sifting through e-mails looking for valid ones.
so basically I check my e-mails about three times a day.

I have never missed a private message and I find that it emulates the way the real world works. How many times have you been on a forum and watched a member post something that they either stated wrong or might have unknowingly offended someone. This is one of those times when you certainly would be thankful that one of the members politely brought this to your attention by PM, right away, if you are the one who posted the unintended ding. I believe that today’s society is moving faster and faster. We have gotten to the point that we can’t even take the time to spell things out any more and are in the process of creating a new language. Soon we all will be texting in shorthand. So for me the PM works just fine, and I will take that over e-mail.

However, most of the time, I am only seeing some silly forwarded messages, especially those that mention about “Friendster will close your account if you don’t forward this message”. After I got disappointed too many times, I have stopped checking all those stupid private messaging.

I agree, but feel arguably one can make an exception for Facebook. As one commenter pointed out, many people nowadays spend about as much time checking facebook as they do their email. And a case can be made for wanting to keep the type of message you get on Facebook separate from your email.

The real issue here is storage. Eventually, hopefully soon, consolidating all email in one place so it can be searched easily will becme easier, and synchronising PM accounts with wherever you store your email archives (most people probably use Gmail for this) will be automated instead of a pain in the neck or straight impossible as it is at present.

If someone really wants to get a hold of me, there’s more than enough breadcrumbs on the net to get in touch (i.e., I don’t use private registration on most of my websites, unless they are owned by my corporate entity.. most aren’t)

I’m a fan of the concept of the forum. Most anything you can say to me, I’d rather have out there for the group. I simply don’t have the time to extrapolate on a point I’ve made for the benefit of one person.

I’ll agree that social networks are a horse of a different color. Also, probably the reason that I don’t use them much.

A solution around this is to do what Craiglist does with random email addresses @craigslist.org. Some sites even let you reply to this temporary email address and it will forward the message to the recipient’s real email address. This kind of threading isn’t hard to do, but it lacks the transparency of simple providing a user’s original email address.

I’m not sure there is a silver bullet for this one though…

With all of the mobility among the folks I don’t talk to all that often, I’ve found that my email address book and typedown lists are usually hopelessly out-of-date as people have switched jobs. With Facebook messaging, I don’t have to worry about that. I’m connected to the person, regardless of where they’re working. (This problem has lessened with people using one Webmail address for life, but not everyone is a personal contact.)

The spam problem is a much bigger issue. I get tons of false positives in my spam folder, meaning I have to go fishing for important mail. You’re more likely to have your message go through if you comment on my blog or send a Facebook message.

Email needs other improvements, too. More thoughts here:
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/09/14/bringing-email-into-the-21st-century/

With you being a student of Computational Media, I can see you being more interested in social apps than a 58-year old retired guy like me would be. But, don’t you somewhat set yourself up for the email noise by plugging into so many different social networks? Would eliminating all of those connections except maybe the top four or five be better, or am I missing something about this whole social network thing? To me it seems like one or two (maybe up to four or five) outlets would be the max I would want to be engaged in. Although I am tempted by natural curiosity to want to “test” several of them, my experience is that it can be hard to get out of some of them once you start “testing” them.

I do sympathize with the email headaches this gives you. Shame of it is that there are probably some gems buried within all of the “lol” noise, and you may get to see the gems because it is easy to go on a deleting spree when you see too much noise.

Regardless, I certainly agree with you that email should be the comm method: throws everything into one bin, so to speak.

I’m a pstam fan… I want the badge to prove it. :)

I have a special email account for social networks, etc. I hardly ever check it, because if I’m in the mood to “social network” then I’ll be on that site anyway. I check the special email rarely, when I do, I quickly scan through the messages, then pretty much delete them all. Private Messaging is a very bad way to contact me.

I tend to find that with friends I tend to use IM a lot more as it more instantaneous, less intrusive and more interactive. So I tend to prefer this to email so I sort of think email while ‘fit and well’ is possibly a little outdated in its way.

Would post on this but is my wifes birthday so I am meant to be off line all day!!! I am reading this as she iChats on her iMac to my parents in the UK on their Mac mini hooked up to their 42″ TV – gotta love technlogy!!!

But along with multiple sites comes multiple clients. I don’t use instant messengers any more because I was sick of having 6 different screen names for however many different clients. Yes, I used Adium (and before that, Proteus) but it was still a major PITA that each system had different [strange] emoticons that distorted my message, different features and capabilities, and all sorts of strange bots *cough–aim*. As a result, I sometimes open Adium with an auto-reply somewhere along the lines of “EMAIL ME LIKE I ASKED YOU TO”.

Pardon the thoughts if they seem incoherent or nonsensical in any way, it’s 2am and I haven’t slept in the past 48 hours–

My perfect solution: All social sites, forums included, give a user the option to use their email as a messaging system. Emails will filter through their system, so that unless specifically set, each user will see only the username and no email address. Also, subjects should contain a label with a word count. That way, if the reply is “yeah lol definitely” then it can be moved into a separate folder apart from any 500-1000 word legitimate discussion. In addition to this, each site’s message page will be customizable so that if I want, I can put a link in it that when clicked on my laptop activates a script to see only messages from that site (or whatever else I want).

By the way, what’s GT like these days? My dad went there in the late 70s, and I think it’d be interesting (I prefer Cooper Union or other lib/arts though). But I’m 15 so I got a while to think about it ;)

Posting a wall comment or a message through a private message service with another friend feels more comfortable to me.

I feel that email is a little old fashioned, and when talking through a social networking site, private messaging should certainly be included. Do you really want your social messages in the same area as spam, business emails, bank alerts, newsletters, etc?

I realize it’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s how it is and everyone I know checks their facebook account just as much if not more than their their email inbox anyways. It doesn’t help that my school has a terrible web-based email UI.

Paul recently posted about why he doesn’t like how private messages are scattered throughout all different sites. I completely agree with him! Although I will have it set so I will get an email notifying me, it just annoys me that I’ll have…

I don’t get the point of requiring someone to login in order to view or reply to a personal message.

Why make me login? For the page views? The fact is that I already am a member of ‘X’ site, you are trying to convert the converted. You are going to get my page views, next time I choose to login.

And not being able to reply from the email site ‘X’ has sent me notifying or providing me the text of a PM is beyond me as well. Site ‘X’ has sent me the notification email to begin with, at the very least provide me with a reply link that does not require me to login. You know I’ll be the only one using that link because I am the only one you sent it to :) All the forums do this for email confirmation when you join, (activation link rarely needs login), why not for a PM reply.

Maybe OpenID will partly reduce the frustration when we will (theoretically) only need to remember one username/password combo.