Email not giving up its crown yet.

Email no longer rules, declared a headline in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. Email has fallen from its throne as the king of wired communication, the author reasoned, because social media, like Facebook and Twitter, offer communicators a more immediate way to share their thoughts, situations and creative endeavors with others. However, while it’s true that email’s monopoly on communication is no more, that doesn’t mean it has relinquished its crown as the wallah of wired information exchange. In fact, social media, rather than snatching email’s diadem, have actually polished it.

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows how much “noise” those services generate. The compulsion by many users of those media to gush minutiae can be numbing. When email was the sole source of online communication, complaints abounded about information overload. That has only worsened with the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Email, though, as a mature technology, has developed ways to cope with noise. Filters sort messages as they arrive. Folders segregate items into bins where they can be logically acted on. Tags and categories further slice and dice clutter. Those things add value to email. By comparison, Twitter and Facebook can feel as if the postman drove a dump truck up to your house and jettisoned a year’s worth of mail on your lawn.

According to the WSJ writer, email is a quaint technology that reflects how people used to use the net. It’s made, she argued, for logging on, downloading and logging off. Social media, she continued, is more attuned to the “always on” connections people have today; this is a very peculiar contention. If anything, the spread of “always on” has been a boon for email. Checking email in bursts was never convenient. Now email programs can remain open from boot-up to shutdown and mail automatically gathered and delivered to an inbox. Moreover, many users are more likely to have their email application open all the time than to be camped at a social networking site. That’s why those sites offer the option of sending email notifications to their members when they receive a personal message or when a discussion they’re interested in is updated. Email quaint? Someone should let the folks at Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry and who continue to make silos of money on that quaint technology, in on that development.

One assertion by the WSJ scribe that’s hard to refute is that the pretenders to email’s lofty status are fun to use. That alone, though, is hardly threatening to email. Fun has entertainment value, but when what a communicator needs conveyed has more than entertainment value, it’s hard to beat email. What would you take more seriously: a 140-character text message written in gibberish or a 200-word email with all the T’s crossed and I’s dotted?

Why wait for email to be delivered when a correspondent can be contacted immediately through Instant Messaging?, asked the WSJ scribbler. That kind of thinking, though, assumes the correspondent wants to drop whatever he or she is doing to instantly respond to you. Instant Messaging can be a meddlesome application. Email, on the other hand, is less intrusive and less likely to irritate than IM. In addition, one has to wonder just how many instant messages require instant responses, or are just sent because a user is more concerned with speed than common sense.

No Wall Street Journal story would be complete without numbers, and this author has some to show email’s decline from favor. She noted that in August 2009, email users climbed 21 percent to 276.9 million users over August a year ago. During the same period, users on social networking and community sites jumped 31 percent to 301.5 million. Do raw numbers translate into increased value?  Most people use email every day for work. So it’s very likely that most of those 276.9 million users are actually using email. On the other hand, how many members of social networks even check out their sites every day? And if they do, how much time do they spend there? If one has an application open on the desktop and is using it all day long, does that application have more or less value than an application that’s used only occasionally? What’s more, a user will have one email program, but may belong to multiple social networks. So while that person counts as a single user of email, he or she could count as multiple users of social networks, thus skewing the growth numbers.

Email no longer rules? Not quite. The new generation of communication services have their place, but it’s mostly removing chaff that detracted from the value of email. Pithy messages that clogged email boxes can be relegated to text messages from mobile phones, a twit or a posting to a Facebook wall. For high value communication, for communication that’s important, email remains king.