OUR VIEW: Goodbye e-mail, hello Facebook

It's been sad to see the craft of letter writing dwindle during the Internet years. No one writes a letter anymore; you can't even find aerograms anymore. We have to read old novels, such as Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" or Bram Stoker's "Dracula." In those novels, there was the cream of letter writing; detailed, interesting missives that captured a reader's interest all the way through until the writer's signature.

Let's face it: E-mail has dealt a mortal blow to the finely crafted letter. It's damaged the Post Office too, which is struggling to survive in a high-tech environment where messages can be sent and received in an instant.

Having witnessed e-mail clobber the traditional letter, it is ironic that e-mail is now itself starting a slow fade to irrelevance. The instant message that e-mail provides is not enough for many's tech needs. E-mail's person-to-person communication, the need to sign in and wait for your selected messages to materialize, and burdensome attachments make it seem quaint and even old fashioned.

People want more than that now: They want an audience of friends, even a network of people or corporations to have quick access to what they have to say or think.

Call it the Facebook revolution, since Facebook seems to be putting MySpace into pasture of late. Or it's the Twitter revolution, or the Flickr revolution ... We are in an amazing time. We can send message to hundreds of thousands of people instantaneously. We can post our lives or our businesses -- photos, videos, products, even what we fed the kids for breakfast.

The new "Facebook" world is addictive. It's a part of our lives that we partake of at home and work. In truth, it -- along with Twitter and other tools -- can be a marketing tool for businesses. In fact, it's a crucial tool for media, which needs to keep up with the Internet's broadband-speed global reach.

But there are questions that come with this high-tech leap. Businesses will need to evaluate how much time is spent by employees on social media sites. In the office, how much Facebooking is for fun and how much is to promote the business. How much social media time is profitable?

Another concern is how much information is being released on these sites. Are individuals too frank when chatting? Are businesses providing too much proprietary information, or offering too many clues to strategy. Is "Company A" keeping a close eye on "Company B's" Twitter page?

These are the questions we face in this early 21st century information technology world. It will be fascinating to live through the next IT generational shift.