Since the dawn of the Internet age, basic e-mail has remained the online world's version of comfort food - familiar and unchanging.
But the rapid rise of other forms of electronic communication are transforming e-mail from a stand-alone application into one that incorporates mobile text, chat, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter and online document sharing.
One measure of that transformation is Facebook's move last month to roll out a "modern messaging system" built atop the company's wildly popular social-networking platform. Analysts say that may prove to be a major catalyst for that evolution, both for consumers and for businesses.
"We believe it represents the long-term co-evolution and convergence of e-mail with social media and other messaging types, whereby e-mail becomes more social and social media takes on e-mail attributes," according to a soon-to-be released Gartner research report.
E-mail may not totally disappear, but experts say in five to 10 years, it may look far different than it does today.
"Within five years, we think the questions about social networking versus e-mail will be largely moot, as the two elements will have been fused together," said the report by Gartner analysts Matt Cain and Ray Valdes.
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