In his keynote at the last Affiliate Summit, Jason Calacanis described how affiliate marketers, or better spammers, destroyed a whole medium. The usenet provided a great platform for online discussions. It supports most features that you can find in emails: threads, attachements, (fake) addresses, you name it. I remember the days when the usenet was pretty much the only place where people gathered for discussions on the internet.

However, around the year 2000 most news groups got polluted with so many spam posts that people started leaving the usenet and moved on to discussion boards on websites. From a user point of view that was a step backwards. Instead of reading targeted groups on usenet we now have to monitor hundreds of different sites to stay updated on all these discussions. I think that’s one of the reasons why the use of RSS spread so quickly.

Today the usenet is used mainly by computer nerds that are sophisticated enough to run spam filters in their news readers and use the system also as a file-sharing platform. Normal people don’t use it and internet beginners don’t even know what it is. Today’s teenagers went straight to the world of Internet Explorer, MySpace and Facebook to exchange text.

I think the same thing is about to happen to email. Even with the best spam filters it’s become impossible to keep all the spam away. People are forced to delete stuff from their inboxes and look for real messages in their junk folders manually everday. What a waste of time and money for any economy. Just like with usenet, people are escaping the open email protocol and move to serviced portals.

Instead of exchanging email addresses, people communicate increasingly via social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or XING. The advantage is that they don’t have to keep up with changing email addresses, the contacts will always be there. Usually they can receive messages from approved contacts only, a whitelist system so to say. Compared to email, spam on social networks is still minimal and that’s why people love it. The downside is that different people are registered on different networks. So instead of using my email interface I have to check accounts in five different social networks to communicate.

From a technical standpoint email is still a great service. I like the separation of header and body so that you can view the topic and perhaps read the text of the message without having to download the attached file. That’s especially good for mobile communication. But I think once a solution is found for managing accounts of multiple social networks, email is going to be buried. Let’s see what OpenSocial will contribute.

If you still think email is the internet’s main communication medium, then you’re basically an old-school, web 1.0 person. Ask your 14-year old niece how often she logs on to Facebook and how often she uses email. You’ll be surprised. If you are an affiliate marketer and still spam the crap out of people, you’re not gonna be able to reach many young people soon. It’s like with online vs. offline advertising. Young people hardly buy newspapers and spend more time online than in front of the television.