Remember the time when you used to get an email from someone and you used to scroll down through a jungle of “forwards”, until you actually know what the email is about (often the email contains only one stupid motivational/feel good about yourself quote or a joke)?

Remember the time where you used to send and receive “how are you” emails or “status updates” emails from your friends?

Remember the time when most of the personal emails you received had about 500 people in the “To”, 5,000 in the “CC”, and probably millions in the “BCC”?

Well – maybe you don’t anymore, because the last time your received such emails was probably 3 years ago. So, what happened? Did all your friends dump you? Did your friends all of a sudden discover (and rightly so) that you weren’t interested in these chain emails that flooded your inbox? Unfortunately – no. Your friends decided to throw they trash elsewhere, namely Facebook and WhatsApp.

Facebook and WhatsApp took over all the junk and nonsense that used to flood emails before. These one-joke-or-quote-emails that were sent to thousands have now morphed into Facebook or WhatsApp messages that you may elect not to read. These status updates by emails are now Facebook updates or quick messages on WhatsApp. Nearly all casual and non-essential email functionality has moved to both Facebook and WhatsApp – and that’s a good thing for 2 reasons: 1) Facebook and WhatsApp are much better at handling spam and blocking than the best managed email server and 2) email is now back to being a professional medium for communication, with less noise.

Now – going back to the title of this post – yes, Facebook and WhatsApp have rendered email useless for many, but these “many” weren’t the type of people that used email for anything productive, which means that what happened is actually a win-win scenario: email got rid of these useless users and became reliable once again, and Facebook and WhatsApp gained more users and inflated their market value.

PS: I love WhatsApp and I think it’s the best App out there – I just wanted to clarify this before someone judges me.

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