Pontificating on the death of email appears almost as popular these days as is funding social networking software companies. In an article [registration or subscription required] on Salon, Dave Farber, Dave Crocker, Brad Templeton and Jakob Nielsen all comment on the state of email today. They are in agreement — "…basically e-mail does not work anymore, which means that we have to tear it apart." (Nielsen) Interestingly, none of the technologists believe that today's technology can save email. I particularly enjoyed Templeton's comments on content filtering:

"Filtering on the content is generally a bad idea. If you're actually going to really mail someone about Viagra, I don't know how you'd get that through. I'm sure the Nigerians are facing the same problems."

No great solutions are proposed by the panelists in this article, but rest assured folks like Farber are working on the problem.