Then in the last year something new has happened, which I see as the combined rise of mobile Internet technology and Facebook. While smartphones have made us more e-mail-enabled than ever, I think people are actually sending less total e-mail as a result, substituting SMS texting and mobile use of social networks.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

And don’t forget that our youngest networked generation — teenagers — doesn’t e-mail at all, preferring the immediacy and intimacy of texting to almost anything else.

All true sentiments, of course.  I think the bigger epiphany for me at this stage, however, isn’t how email is declining as a defining medium of the web, but how, for a short time, there was a movement that enabled people to create and participate in an exchange of ideas in the wild.  ”Blogging”, you might call it.  Now, so much activity happens behind closed walls, and even if it isn’t, so much of it is shortened to 140 characters or less, that it isn’t private discourse one should be worried about, its the public one, shouldn’t it?

Well, that bit about teens not twittering anyway.  Earlier last month, Caroline McCarthy pointed out an interesting study from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network.

What’s kind of interesting that isn’t mentioned in the original CNet article, is that the survey is made of 200 individuals who were members and consumers from the Participatory Media Network.  I take this to mean that these are individuals who already have a bias to be tech-friendly and social-media minded.

And yet, out of those 200 individuals aged 19-24, only 22% of them were on Twitter.

However, in keeping with the Morgan Stanley report, which talks about teens being on social networks, 99% of those surveyed were also on social networks.

And I’m sure this is all just the tip of the iceberg (in a Pew poll conducted last year, only 19% of teens / young adults were on Twitter).  In my anecdotal and non-scientific polling of friends and family this is entirely consistent.  Most teens and young adults I know aren’t on Twitter, and if they have heard of it, just don’t “get” it to any degree.

Even as Twitter continues to explode, one wonders how sustainable it is, if it doesn’t have the power of demographics on its side.  Or, perhaps, if it will, perhaps like Facebook, inevitably skew to an older individuals over time, safety issues or no.

What Friendfeed has to have is some kind of inflection point where its inherent greatness pulled through, was recognized by all, and contributed to some greater good.  The key, of course, is that “inherent greatness” — as Scoble points out, there are a lot of things it kind of does well, but hamstrung by a manpower (and goodness knows what else), its become easy pickings for Facebook to merely mimick the features off of.  That is to say, if Scoble can’t pin down a few singularly great things about Friendfeed, what hope does any of us have when we try and describe it to would-be fans?

Allen Stern describes it as something like a forum.  I would agree … but perhaps what Friendfeed needs to do, or become, is something more evolved than a mere forum.  The thing that blew my mind about Friendfeed wasn’t just how it was an aggregator, but how it enabled real-time conversations that were impossible to track with Twitter.  Perhaps what Friendfeed lacks, then, is the magic sauce that powered Twitter through its would-be-Nobel-nominating efforts in Iran: its ability to be used through text-messaging and SMS-services.  Imagine, for a moment, the kind of impact that secure and private rooms for conversations to be had, in real time, on the fly, off your desktop for would-be revolutionaries in Iran (or, anywhere, for that matter).

There’s still time for an inflection point to happen with Friendfeed, but I’d agree with one of Scoble’s assertions: to make the transition from good to great, they are going to have to think of something clever that Facebook can’t just copy — Facebook has the manpower and resources to continue making Friendfeed a “feature” without it.

But none of that matters if Bing doesn’t grow and find a way to compete with Google . So after a month, where are we? We knew that Bing was growing, but the numbers being released tonight tell a tale of success, as Bing is now the 13th most visited site on the web.

According to Compete.com, Bing was able to amass 49.57 million unique visitors in its first month as Microsoft’s official search engine. Bing’s traffic trumps that of Digg (38.96 million) Twitter (23 million), and CNN (28.54 million). We want to stress that this focuses on U.S. visitors, since Compete does not track international visits.

The problem is that all of those stats are quite misleading without attributing the fact that Microsoft’s previous search engine, Live.com, redirects directly to Bing.com.  If you look at the stats for Live.com, you’ll notice that prior to Bing.com it hit an apogee of around 100 million visitors per month.  In fact, I’d say that since traffic for Bing is “only” at around half of what Live.com was the month prior to its debut, its probably far too early to tell how popular it actually is.

Furthermore, when you take into consideration that MSN.com directly feeds into Bing (previously Live) at the top of its page (primo real estate if there ever was any), and that MSN.com is the default home page for millions of Internet Explorer home pages, its further reason to take it all with a grain of salt.

I think the jury’s out on how popular Bing is — and with all due respect to Ben Parr,  that jury’s only due in several months I’d say.

With the maturing of Google apps out of beta (just a few hours ago), and the announcement of Google’s own online OS just now, one wonders if the pieces are beginning to drop into place with respect to Google carving out its own niche — in earnest, this time — about the future of computing.  Sure, there’s always going to be a place for a desktop OS, just like there’s always going to be a place for desktop applications.  But in terms of The Future, one has to wonder where the proportion of where most people are going to spend there time — and productivity — lies.

I’ve written about the secret data centers and the dark fibre Google’s purchased over the years, and one wonders if this isn’t all part of one big plan that was conceived a long, long, time ago.

Today Google is about search.

Tomorrow … Google may allow others to own “Fun” (?)  and “Social” (Facebook? Twitter?) … but its pushing to own Productivity (of which search is only one part) on these interwebs.  Hopefully it’ll be as profitable as owning Productivity has been for Microsoft all of these years.

Recent schemes involve companies promising to pay Twitter users hundreds of dollars a day to tweet after they sign up for a free training kit, which the bureau said ends up sucking away a hefty monthly payment.

Having said that, similar scams proliferate on the Google, and if you look hard enough (because you probably ignore ads), you’ll see a whole whack of banner adds (in all sizes) proclaiming how people earn cash off the Google, and you’ll learn how if you only click and send in $19.99 … but only inform you in the fine print of how it’ll cost multiples of that initial cost in residuals.

Anyway, I think Friendfeed would benefit tremendously by getting someone over there (and, really anywhere where people are pushing out their social media profiles to millions of laypeople all the time), to sell their idea of what Friendfeed is — and how it can help by inserting five words to the end of any social media pimping phrase.

Those words?

“… and follow it all on Friendfeed.”

While its not uncommon for Twitter celebrities to get subscribers in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, I daresay that amongst the lay public (and even amongst the Twitterati), that while Twitter has its obvious benefits (its pretty much the only way to get up to date news from what’s going on in Iran at the moment, for example), it continues to suffer from a few significant drawbacks, not the least of which are unified areas to both have and witness conversations,  unify social media streams, and in a meaningful way, increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

There’s no question that Twitter is the media’s favourite darling at the moment, but I wonder if and when the shoe will ever really drop on Friendfeed as the real means of “joining the conversation” (another phrase I hear all the time on CNN) in a way that’s just not possible on Twitter.