My friend Jose writes on his blog about the shift from email to facebook as primary communication tool thanks to spam.  It's a situation that feels like a 15-year long train wreck to me, watching the rising volume of unsolicited commercial email wash over the world like a giant tsunami ever since the start of the popularization of the internet.

Email, using a non-web client, is still the center of my daily time-management practice. it's how information flows from the world to my calendar and to-do list. it's still the killer app, for me. but i'm a power user. I spend a non-trivial amount of time every day categorizing and deleting spam, and some time on a less-frequent basis tweaking my various spam filters.  It's something that works ok for me, but I realize that a lot of people don't have the tools or the time to live this way.  However, I still can't stand when people try to organize and do business via facebook messaging - FB's interface is just so bad and annoying...  but it's happening more and more, and i realize it's all because most people don't have the tech skils, resources, or patience to continue to battle email spam.  

what would the internet look like if spam hadn't destroyed email for most users? sigh.  the other thing i often forget and then re-remember is that for most people email IS the web - they just use a web app to get their email, which, even with gmail, is a poor interface compared to a dedicated client.  so to a lot of people, facebook's UI is no worse than the yahoo or hotmail or squirrelmail interface that they once were stuck with.

it's interesting that one communication mode was destroyed by unethical marketing and is now replaced with another communication mode that is funded by another type of marketing, which, when you take into account the concerns about FB's escalating privacy-violating practices, is also probably unethical (and in a deeper way, is harming us) but is easier for the average person to put up with on a daily basis.