Like the pay phone, paying bills by snail mail and getting your newspaper delivered to your door, the days of email are numbered. In its place is a new generation of services to communicate and interact online with the speed and alacrity often missing with plain vanilla email.

A new report in the Wall Street Journal outlines the new generation of services that are moving in and replacing email. That includes services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying to gain a foothold in this new world. The bottom line is that email is so 20^th century. Why wait for an email response when you can get one quicker over instant messaging?

Well, it's surprising that email continues to grow, even as other types of communication are growing much faster. In August 2009, 277 million people used email across the United States, European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21 percent from 229 million a year earlier.

But the number of people using social networks grew more dramatically, up 31 percent to 302 million people in 2009, according to the polling organization.

The message is clear: Don't be stuck with email as your primary source of communication with employees and customers. Email is becoming a dinosaur, and you may be, too, if you don't change.

For more on the next generation of communications:
- see this Wall Street Journal article

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