I was drawn to this article for a number of reasons:
It reminded me of an article I wrote in April based on my own experience of an decline in the use of email to communicate.
I have recently concluded a contract where I really struggled (in fact I failed) to get people to move away from email (they were creating long, complicated and confusing threads).
It reminded me that “these days” I probably IM at least 4 times as much as I email.
Seems like this is a pretty hot topic at the moment:
http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/general-im-news/39082-im-predictions-2007-a.html#212983
For my part what I really want to see is the ability to chat across carriers i.e. MSN to AIM. In the UK when SMS first got launched you could only “text” to people on the same network (carrier) as you which was really dumb. It wasn’t a technical thing – it was revenue attempt. Now, of course, ypu can text to basically anyone with a mobile (cell) phone anywhere in the world – and that is smart!