I wonder if there’s a corrolation between Clay’s gut and the values of teenagers. I knew Usenet was dead when teens stopped knowing what it was. Same with IRC. Don’t get me wrong: all of us geeky social software folks still use both. (And Marc Smith still believes that we can make Usenet work.)

Teens are focused less and less on email. It no longer provides an identity marker in the way it used to. Even at universities, students are more likely to use their easily accessible hotmail account than the university account. This also means that they are forced to constantly fight the annoyances of spam.

The value of email is no longer there. Instead, youth rely heavily on IM (and SMS where available). Parents don’t get to read the records of these conversations and if spam is a problem, you can just block everyone but your friends. Plus, now that you can send IMs without having to be logged in (it’ll just get queued), why worry about synchronicity?

I’ve always been a big believer in paying attention to teens in order to understand the longterm viability of older technologies. But maybe Clay’s gut will be just as effective…

Because blogging is inherently social and a good way to chew on ideas with friends and colleagues, i’m going to be participating in Many-to-Many as a guest blogger.

(Do be warned: at times, i will repost things from there here, as relevant)