I have not ever nor have I ever been asked to be ‘tweeted’ but according to Nicole Simon our guest speaker and an expert on the world of blogging and micro blogging, this is the way things are headed. Apparently personal emails are on deaths door, they are so past ‘it’ that they can’t see the ‘I’ anymore. At first I was dumbfounded, of course people are still on the ‘e’, heck I check mine hourly, that is if I have not heard that ‘ping’ from my phone. However when I thought more into it I knew she was right. I can’t remember the last time that somebody who wasn’t a sales assistant trying to sign me up to a mailing list asked me for my personal email, the only times I ever enter it now is for online shopping or account verification. I am a bit too sad to think about it as I thought I loved my ‘e’ accounts too much to lose them, but my actions are telling me otherwise.

When I started at CIBU, only one person asked me for my personal ‘e’ for a team project while everyone else asked me if I was on Skype. I am on Skype but I didn’t quite get the Skype thing, I used it just to call overseas, not to message, I am on hotmail and yahoo for that, but hey I guessed that Mainland Europeans did things a bit differently and now I am in to it, it just lacks the fun dancing animations of hotmail.

The only people that ever email my personal account are my mum, my boyfriends mom, my friends who are at work and are blocked off social networking sites and my boyfriend when he is ‘underway’ so can only use the ship email for contact. My mum and my boyfriend’s mom don’t do social networking sites, for my mum she just hates the idea of anyone having that much of her personal information, and my boyfriend’s mom, well she is just not into it, her time off is her time, not time to be spent in front of a computer screen. I do Skype with my mum though, as her being in Abu Dhabi would leave astronomical phone bills but it is purely as a substitute for the phone, she will uses her personal e all the time and I can not see her changing this until she is forced. They could be viewed as ‘late adopters’ or even ‘laggards’ and will only move from the personal e kicking and screaming, unlike me who gave it up without noticing.

 My boyfriend only e’s me when he is not allowed or able to communicate with me any other way, it is really a last resort. If he is on a ship and not allowed to use any IM (instant messengers) then we email and it is dull, the wait for the response, the formality of seeing fully composed sentences with proper English and grammar really takes the conversational aspect out of it. As soon as he is off the ship and somewhere with internet access we messenger, we tend not to use Skype as his usually has to share a room and people are nosey.

Facebook has become my life time to my f&f’s (friends and family), they can see what I am up to, I can be as personal or impersonal as I desire, I can share my photos, keep updated with birthdays and in general plan my life. It is pathetic how much I do on it, I send my emails on it, I send birthday cards, well wishes and so on. I am worried now with the whole privacy issue as I know that companies have kept copies of emails for a while but I never felt like they could be used for commercial purposes but now with the whole Facebook issue I mentioned in my previous post I am wondering if my e’s have been too personal and things like this will send people back to personal e?

Nicole Simon mentioned that people now ‘tweet’ each other, Twitter.com is still something that I am getting the hang of and have yet to fully explore the possibilities of it. I can see that it has so many possibilities especially in the information and news arena’s however as not many of the people I know are on it I am still slightly hesitation to invest time into it. I want to leave Facebook, but I am addicted, I want to know what people are doing, I want to see the dodgy holiday snaps, the ‘Jane Doe is now single’ announcements’, just 2 days ago I read a wall post off a girl who was dating one of my friends briefly last year, on the post she was thanking people for their engagement congratulations however she has been engaged for over 2 years she just hadn’t changed her status! Wow I thought, it is that kind of salacious gold that keeps me on. Twitter is the future but Facebook is now, they are not inter changeable, they satisfy two separate needs in my view, Facebook is the is my perezhilton.com and Twitter.com is my Michael Tomasky, one fluff and one substance.  For now I will keep my personal e, I hope it doesn’t die but like the letter it might linger just loose its impact