We did a quick bit (with a cuts-to-the-point graph) last week that showed how social network traffic had surpassed email traffic. It’s a meme that was apparently in the air, as talk of the end of email and the start of something new was definitely on the agenda this week:

- Slate: The Death of Email

- NY Times: Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google Turn Email into A Social Network

- Thomas Hawk: Email, 1961-2007 RIP…Thank God!

- A VC Blogs: Messaging, Not EmailThis is an important trend that’s right in front of all our faces but could be easily missed by Facebook-debunking naysayers.

Communications is moving away from synchronous and one-to-one (phone and even IM) to asynchronous and many-to-many. This messaging occurs over a wide and ever-growing array of platforms. Fred Wilson of A VC lists just some of them:

Instant Messaging
Blogging (each post is a message)
Skyping (text+voice)
Voice Mail Transcription (voice to text)
Twittering/FB status update
Web mail
Web site messaging (FB messages)
Comments on social media
Social gestures (actions in the news feed)
Text messaging (sms)

Writes Wilson: “Messaging is messaging and we all do it in different ways. But the massive evolution of messaging services is creating a big opportunity to rationalize it. ” (emphasis mine)

Think the way to “rationalize it” is the “unified inbox” that we see as the shining example of unified communications? Think again. It’s more likely to be a world in which syndication technologies like RSS publish messages out for all the world to see and consume. The message-maker controls what they send out but the message-receiver has equal control over what they consume.

It’s messy and a real break from the past — but it’s happening in real-time today across the protocol soup of services described above.

Enabling and being a part of that world is the opportunity.