No - it's not dead, and likely never will be.
It's a paradigm that is extremely useful for asynchronous, private communications. Why else would facebook have it built in to their platform?
Until facebook and twitter and myspace and name-the-social-flavour-of-the-month proprietary platforms find a way to deliver messages asynchronously between and across platforms, email will continue to fill that role.
Of course, when they do figure that messaging system out it will be a different world we live in.
And you know what it'll be called?
Email.
In a recent BNET video feature, Clara Shih of Hearsay Labs, posed this very question. With Facebook at 300 million users and IPhone and Twitter around 60 million users, social media platforms and SMS are carrying an ever-increasing share of the converstation. In fact…according to Clara Shih, college students rarely use email and when they do it’s to communicate with teachers, parents and others who may be less connected to them in social networks.
[video=360980-BNET]
