The end of e-mail age
1 Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
电子邮件作为通信之王经历了飞速发展。不过它的统治时代已经终结。
2 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.
新一代服务开始取而代之，比如Twitter、Facebook和其他无数争着想在新世界中分一杯羹的服务。如同10多年前电子邮件的出现一样，这一转变有望深刻地改写人们通信的方式──以我们刚刚能够开始想像得到的方式。
3 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.
当然，我们仍会使用电子邮件。不过电子邮件更适合以往人们使用互联网的方式──隔三差五地登录、登出、查看信息。如今，我们总是联着网，无论我们是坐在桌子前还是用手机。这种总是联网的状态产生了一系列新的通信方式，比电子邮件要快的多，也有趣的多。
4 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.
如果你可以通过及时消息更快地得到答案，为什么还要等待电子邮件回复呢？由于Facebook的出现，有些问题不必问就已经知道答案了。如果一位朋友更新了Facebook上的公开状态，告诉全世界她已经下班了，你就无需再问她了。与目前处于测试阶段的谷歌Wave等服务相比，拖着“附件”的电子邮件看起来要枯燥得多。通过谷歌Wave，用户可以把照片从桌面拖放到Wave中，与别人分享照片，并输入评论。
5 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. 难怪在电子邮件继续增长之际，其他类型的通信服务却在以更高的速度增长。据尼尔森(Nielsen Co.)的数据，2009年8月，美国、欧洲的几个国家、澳大利亚和
巴西有2.769亿电子邮件用户，较2008年8月的2.292亿增长了21%。而社交网站和其他社群网站的用户数量飙升了31%，至3.015亿。
6 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.
那么，这些新的工具将如何改变我们通信的方式？让我们先看看最一目了然的方面：它们使我们的交流互动更快了。
7 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.)
很多年前，如果信件要几天才能到达，我们会感到沮丧不已。几年前，如果电子邮件接收迟了半小时，我们就会抱怨连连。而今天，如果一条文字信息的传送多花了几秒钟的时间，我们就会发牢骚。几个月后，我们可能会抱怨自己的手机不能自动地向一定距离内的朋友发短信，让他们知道我们就在附近。（已经有很多服务提供这样的功能了。）
8 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.
这些新的服务还会使通信更频繁和随意──更像是博客评论或随便说出的话，而不是发给一个人的精雕细琢的电子邮件。无需花费时间给你那几个最好的朋友写长长的电子邮件，谈论你的假期过的如何。如今，如果这些朋友感兴趣的话，他们可以实时地在网上了解你的度假生活。你不是每周向屈指可数的几个朋友发送几封电子邮件，而是可以每天向数百个认识你或和你半生不熟的人发送几十条消息。
9 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.
你可以考虑用Twitter。这个服务使用户可以向注册阅读用户（即关注者，followers）发送140个字符的信息。因此，你不用向朋友发封电子邮件，宣布你刚刚找到了一份新工作，你只要向所有选择“关注(follow)”的人“推(tweet)”一下就可以了。你可以在信息中创建特殊用户链接，只要输入@再加上他们的用
