Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated This content requires a paid GigaOM Pro subscription

Email first emerged back in 1965 as a way for users of time-sharing mainframes to communicate, but it wasn't until the '90s that usage really exploded. It totally supplanted written memos in businesses and replaced a lot of phone communication, thus becoming the "killer app" of the early Internet generation. Recently, the increased use of alternative communication tools — Twitter and other microblogging services, instant messaging, SMS, social media and others — has caused speculation about the "death of email." But will alternative communication tools providing a real challenge to email's dominance as a professional and personal messaging platform? […]