Mike Altendorf recalls a year of social media

So, 2009: the year of global economic meltdown, bonus backlash and Twitter. This 140-character phenomenon has become a national obsession. Everyone from cricketers to cadets is involved, competing for followers and sharing their pearls of wisdom with the collective crowd. I liken it to the noisy rooks that frequent my garden at the moment - competing loudly for attention and leaving me wishing I had a shotgun to hand.

That's not to say Twitter doesn't have value. It is completely of the moment - spontaneous and often random. In many ways it is the antithesis of email, which has now become the primary way for people to organise themselves. On email, everything is stored, tucked away in individual filing systems, neatly labelled and ordered. Not so on Twitter.

Contrary to popular thinking (led by a professor at the University of Kent) email is definitely not dead. In fact, the explosion in social networking has meant that email is more popular than ever as most social networks rely on email to update users.

In fact, right now, email is killing off another antiquated technology - the file share. More and more of us now use email as our primary filing system and woe betide the CIO who insists on a 50MB mailbox limit these days - he will be condemning his workforce to endless archiving and deleting.

But the future does not lie in either Twitter or email - in fact it will be a combination of the two and much more besides. What we are likely to see is each of these technologies effectively replaced at the front end by a much more intuitive interface - one that gives you access to instant messaging, social networks and email and allows you to choose the most appropriate way to communicate based on a particular situation. Such an interface will make e-discovery and archiving much more important as that single interface will be a doorway to a huge information repository.

This year was also the year of Windows 7, for which I am eternally grateful. Living with Vista was like having an extra (and particularly uncooperative) teenager in the house: highly unpredictable and the cause of huge amounts of emotional stress.

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