“Email is where information goes to die.” nuance partner Bill French, co-Founder of MyST first said that to me sometime around 2002. He was talking about the evolution of wikis, RSS and more collaborative forms of web communication.

Last week at the I/O conference, Google’s Open Social guru Kevin Marks told me that young people — those using the more culturally-foused mega social networks like MySpace — only use email to communicate with their parents, but that they are using social networks as their primary web communications platform.

If you need proof, look no farther than the sociology research Danah Boyd is doing at UC Berkeley. In a nutshell, she’s got the research to support what Kevin and Bill suggest.

My recent experiences fit this paradigm. It starts with the massive email failure I have been enduring this week, courtesy of an unannounced policy change at Comcast, my Internet provider (tho maybe not for much longer) which has crippled my ability to communicate via email. This is my third major multi-day email outage in the past year, and each one is becoming less of a critical failure, and more of a freedom accompanying the feeling of a weight being lifted off my shoulders.

Consider my following business-critical tasks that don’t require email:

• tracking not only about 70 news sites with RSS, but also the trouble tickets for two blog tools.
• project updates and biz-dev leads posted to the group tools Business Catapult uses as part of our publishing platform,
• write blog posts to update colleagues and clients about important changes in the business ecology.
• Skype is the primary platform for quick-hit, need-a-response-now exchanges with teammates and close colleagues
• texting — the phone is replacing the laptop for email communications, as evidenced by the higher percentage of “sent from my iPhone/Blackberry” tags on replies to mail. these short bursts are more like text messages, brief and lightly punctuated.

And yet, a paradox is revealed. Corporations (and other “enterprises” to use the software vernacular) thrive (or choke) on email.

Marks put it best, talking about how corporate workers “spend their day un-bolding email (by which he means treating emails as to-do lists, trying to read and manage each one), but I just kind of watch it flow by. If something doesn’t stay on the top of the list (via replies and running discussion), it just passes into history.”

It’s clear that Bill, Kevin and I are effectively reporting from the future. We all still use email (almost) every day to communicate about business. But the trend is ending. And the next generation thinks we’re dinosaurs. And I’m not even 40 yet.