Midlife crisis for email, 40

As social networking services peak, Adam Turner asks if electronic mail has passed its prime.

IT IS 40 years since American computer engineer Ray Tomlinson put the @ into email addresses, triggering a communications revolution that would forever change the way we correspond. Yet email now faces a mid-life crisis as young people turn to newer forms of communication, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Internal messaging systems have existed since the 1960s but in 1971 Tomlinson was helping build ARPANET for the US Department of Defence and laying the foundations of the modern internet. Tomlinson needed an easy way to send electronic messages between the various computers hooked up to ARPANET. He chose @ - generally referred to as the ''at'' symbol - to designate that a message was intended for a specific user ''at'' a specific organisation. The email protocol continued to develop but, for the next 20 years, it was restricted to academic and military use.    Full Read