A few months ago Hawk Wings blogged a Business Week report that claimed email has had its day. Generation Xers and corporations alike are switching to instant messaging, wikis, collaborative blogging and other Web 2.0 innovations in order to get things done.

It turns out that Stowe Boyd predicted the death of email in the Summer of 2004 at the Supernova conference. He was hounded from the podium by cynical hecklers.

We shouldn’t mourn email’s passing, Boyd says:

It should be obvious that the only thing that email is well-suited for is things that look suspiciously like spam: broadcasting a static message to many, many people…

…So this will be the year when it becomes truly obvious — even to those dinosaurs who wanted to tar-and-feather me at Supernova — that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Better start a blog about iChat.