[azurezyq]

Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places.

I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there, and I don't think official communications can be treated as "social networks".

I'm wondering if the same thing is happening in other developing countries where people first touched facebook/whatsapp before even knowing E-mail exists.

[majormajor]

Yeah, there's a big list of global differences around "what technology was around when these systems started getting built." Results in a weird mix of things looking both more and less futuristic than wherever home is in certain places; for me this was most striking when visiting Japan a while back and seeing how automated with vending machines and such a lot of ramen shops were compared to the US, but at the same time how cash-based they still were - the vending machines were very clearly very mechanical, not networked or "smart" machines, that just processed paper money and nothing else.

[ImaCake]

I was in Japan last year, and I found the the ramen shop vending machines to very useful and reliably good at their job. What struck me as weird in Japan was the dominance of flip phones. I think they use them for credit card transactions and email which they pioneered earlier. So when smartphones came along, they didn't adopt them as rapidly as the US or Australia.

[r00fus]

I think it's a bit reductionist to say "X is the new <existing standard>". Especially when X is proprietary.

Email is a standard. There are multiple providers. It's a great lowest-common-denominator.

Does any company really want a part of that without changing the above? I thought Uber establishing a "defacto standard" for ride-sharing which can be copied by competitors is one of the strategy points we criticize here on HN?

I don't know the Chinese market, but just keep in mind at some point everyone thought that FB/Twitter were going to kill RSS. Fact is, RSS is still around and being used a lot (Podcasts?). While FB/Twitter have restricted access to monetize (or prevent others monetizing) their proprietary platform.

Email will be still around when WeChat is dead and gone.

[pinwale]

> Email will be still around when WeChat is dead and gone.

I highly doubt that. WeChat is so deeply embedded in daily life in China that I would almost consider it required to do anything substantial in China.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/technology...

[huhweirdyhat]

When you lease an apartment, do you get the details via WhatsApp/WeChat/TodaysChatApp or email? How about receipts, bank statements, anything where deliverability actually matters?

Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years.

In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likely to outlive walled gardens because there's no long-term reason to use them.

In particular, unless there's a decent way to ensure that nobody can take my received messages away from me, i'm unlikely to adopt it for anything but chatting with friends.

[pinwale]

In China, you will probably do all of the above in WeChat rather than email. Whenever I need to conduct business with someone in China, it's always over WeChat rather than email.

One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate court cases through WeChat as well.

[ryandrake]

As a non-Chinese, this seems... problematic to say the least. What if you don't have WeChat, or prefer not to use it? Are there standards-based alternatives offered? Off-line alternatives, maybe?

[codebeaker]

Chiming in to share an anecdote from yesterday, I was in the MacStore and there was what I'd describe as a totally normal early 20s white guy there, they asked him for an email address to send his confirmation or sth, and he was like "dude, I don't really use email, can I not get an SMS or something?" …… turns out that's not possible, so he gave them a friend's email address, the same one (his friend's) that he uses for his iCloud account.

I found it kind of strange, anyway.

[wrycoder]

Messaging apps like WeChat and Slack are really too ephemeral for discussion and documentation of serious business matters, in my experience.

[jon-wood]

For discussion its fine, but documentation still needs to exist. I feel like we're in the point of the technology cycle where people realise Slack and friends can't solve all their problems, just as email/phone calls/memos/whatever don't form long term documentation.

[amorroxic]

I actually tend to agree here. While purism is understandable (email is, should and will continue to be the gold standard) reality is that no-one has 10 years to spare waiting for users to realize its value once more and migrate back in droves.

Also, who's to say communication won't become my-bot-against-your-bot kind of thing for instance? Given choice between standards and convenience people don't seem to think too long before going with the latter..

[adventured]

I've got 13 years of emails in my personal gmail account, keeping track of everything from bill payments & receipts to valuable conversations. How does WeChat satisfy something very long-term like that? I don't see how any of the existing, popular messaging platforms can replace the fixed, archival value of email.

The majority of Internet users in the US - nearly 80% of US adults have a smartphone - are mobile savvy and were that way before the Chinese majority got there. Being mobile savvy has nothing to do with it.

[yorwba]

> How does WeChat satisfy something very long-term like that?

You can search your message history. I think that's enough for most personal archives. Of course if WeChat goes away, many people will be unable to access their archives, but at the moment, few seem to be worrying about that.

> Being mobile savvy has nothing to do with it.

Not being internet savvy before becoming mobile savvy has something to do with it. I'd wager that most heavy email users had an email address before they got their smart phone.

If you don't already have an extensive email archive, keeping all your personal communication in email no longer seems so compelling.

[ringaroundthetx]

General rule of thumb for the US, the worst form of printed communication is typically the more official business savvy one.

Probably some correlation to your observations.

[paxy]

Same with India and WhatsApp

[killerdhmo]

Case in point why email will live forever.