Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

    In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold -- services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate -- in ways we can only begin to imagine.

    We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet -- logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

    Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public 'status' on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

    Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

    'The whole idea of this email service isn't really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks,' says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

    So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let's start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.

    Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we'd complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren't automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we're nearby. （A number of services already do this.）

    These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal -- more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they're interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

    Consider Twitter. The service allows users to send 140-character messages to people who have subscribed to see them, called followers. So instead of sending an email to friends announcing that you just got a new job, you can just tweet it for all the people who have chosen to 'follow' you to see. You can create links to particular users in messages by entering @ followed by their user name or send private 'direct messages' through the system by typing d and the user name.

    Facebook is part of the trend, too. Users post status updates that show up in their friends' 'streams.' They can also post links to content and comment on it. No in-box required.

    Dozens of other companies, from AOL and Yahoo Inc. to start-ups like Yammer Inc., are building products based on the same theme.

    David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with 'a river that continues to flow as you dip into it.'

    But the speed and ease of communication cut both ways. While making communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half-dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your 500 other 'friends.' And if you know all these people are reading your updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

    Another obvious downside to the constant stream: It's a constant stream.

    That can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages -- from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans -- being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

    Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.

    Perhaps the biggest change that these email successors bring is more of a public profile for users. In the email world, you are your name followed by a 'dot-com.' That's it. In the new messaging world, you have a higher profile, packed with data you want to share and possibly some you don't.

    Such a public profile has its pluses and minuses. It can draw the people communicating closer, allowing them to exchange not only text but also all sorts of personal information, even facial cues. You know a lot about the person you are talking to, even before you've ever exchanged a single word.

    電子郵件作為通信之王經歷了飛速發展。不過它的統治時代已經終結。

    新一代服務開始取而代之，比如Twitter、Facebook和其他無數爭著想在新世界中分一杯羹的服務。如同10多年前電子郵件的出現一樣，這一轉變有望深刻地改寫人們通信的方式──以我們剛剛能夠開始想像得到的方式。

    當然，我們仍會使用電子郵件。不過電子郵件更適合以往人們使用互聯網的方式──隔三差五地登錄、登出、查看信息。如今，我們總是聯著網，無論我們是坐在桌子前還是用手機。這種總是聯網的狀態產生了一系列新的通信方式，比電子郵件要快的多，也有趣的多。

    如果你可以通過及時消息更快地得到答案，為什么還要等待電子郵件回復呢？由于Facebook的出現，有些問題不必問就已經知道答案了。如果一位朋友更新了Facebook上的公開狀態，告訴全世界她已經下班了，你就無需再問她了。與目前處于測試階段的谷歌Wave等服務相比，拖著"附件"的電子郵件看起來要枯燥得多。通過谷歌Wave,用戶可以把照片從桌面拖放到Wave中，與別人分享照片，并輸入評論。

    難怪在電子郵件繼續增長之際，其他類型的通信服務卻在以更高的速度增長。據尼爾森（Nielsen Co.）的數據，2009年8月，美國、歐洲的幾個國家、澳大利亞和巴西有2.769億電子郵件用戶，較2008年8月的2.292億增長了21%.而社交網站和其他社群網站的用戶數量飆升了31%,至3.015億。

    加州電腦歷史博物館（Computer History Museum）館長伯契納克（Alex Bochannek）說，當你可以有很多很多不同種類的信息和文件，當你在同一種網絡上擁有這一切時，電子郵件服務的概念就不再那么重要了。

    那么，這些新的工具將如何改變我們通信的方式？讓我們先看看最一目了然的方面：它們使我們的交流互動更快了。

    很多年前，如果信件要幾天才能到達，我們會感到沮喪不已。幾年前，如果電子郵件接收遲了半小時，我們就會抱怨連連。而今天，如果一條文字信息的傳送多花了幾秒鐘的時間，我們就會發牢騷。幾個月后，我們可能會抱怨自己的手機不能自動地向一定距離內的朋友發短信，讓他們知道我們就在附近。（已經有很多服務提供這樣的功能了。）

    這些新的服務還會使通信更頻繁和隨意──更像是博客評論或隨便說出的話，而不是發給一個人的精雕細琢的電子郵件。無需花費時間給你那幾個最好的朋友寫長長的電子郵件，談論你的假期過的如何。如今，如果這些朋友感興趣的話，他們可以實時地在網上了解你的度假生活。你不是每周向屈指可數的幾個朋友發送幾封電子郵件，而是可以每天向數百個認識你或和你半生不熟的人發送幾十條消息。

    你可以考慮用Twitter.這個服務使用戶可以向注冊閱讀用戶（即關注者，followers）發送140個字符的信息。因此，你不用向朋友發封電子郵件，宣布你剛剛找到了一份新工作，你只要向所有選擇"關注（follow）"的人"推（tweet）"一下就可以了。你可以在信息中創建特殊用戶鏈接，只要輸入@再加上他們的用戶名，也可以通過輸入"d"加用戶名通過系統發送私人"直接消息".

    Facebook也是這一趨勢的一部分。用戶可以更新狀態，顯示在朋友的"流"中。他們還可以發內容鏈接、對其進行評論。無需收件箱。

    其他幾十個企業都開始建立基于同樣主題的產品，包括美國在線（AOL）、雅虎（Yahoo）和Yammer這樣的初創企業。

    美國在線的一位高管David Liu說，收件箱的替代品好像是"在你踏入其中，一條仍繼續流淌的河".

    不過，通信的速度和舒適性也是雙刃劍。盡管可以使通信變得更頻繁，卻也可能使它變得更缺乏私密性。通信開始變得如此簡單，收件人知道發件人只需很少的時間和思考。不錯，你那幾個最好的朋友可以閱讀你的度假情況。不過你的其他500個"朋友"也可以。如果你知道所有這些人都在閱讀你的更新，你可能就不會說那么多了。

    持續不斷流動的信息有著另外一個顯而易見的不利因素：它是持續不斷的。

    這可能會加大判斷各種信息重要性的難度。當人們可以更容易地發送從早餐到夜生活計劃的各種各樣的信息時，能夠判斷出哪些信息是確實重要的，或哪些需要回復，都不是輕而易舉的事。過量的信息可能會導致一些人干脆對全部信息都置之不理。

    這樣的"噪聲"使我們更加依賴于技術來幫助交流。如果沒有軟件幫助我們根據我們認為相關的因素對信息進行過濾和組織，我們就會淹沒在海量的信息中。

    或許電子郵件的這些接班人帶來的最大變化是用戶的公開信息增多。在電子郵件的世界里，你就是你的名字加上".com".僅此而已。在新的通信世界里，你的個人信息增多了，充滿你希望與人分享的數據，可能還有一些你不希望與人分享的信息。

    這樣的公開信息有利也有弊。它可以讓人們更近地交流，使他們不僅可以交流文字，還有各種各樣的個人信息，甚至是面部表情。你會通過互聯網非常了解和你對話的人，甚至是在你們真正開口說第一個字之前。