In the work and research that Blue State Digital has conducted, we agree with comScore's conclusion that teenagers don’t use email; they are primarily reliant on Facebook and text messaging. Technology is a means of talking to people they see every day – their friends and their parents. What used to be passed around in notes in the back of classrooms has moved to SMS – “Want to go to the movies?” or “OMG – ____ likes you.”

But we also see that email use substantially picks up when teens hit college. People move away. Relationships become more complex. People have bills and official correspondences. They can't talk to their boss on Twitter, and they can't send over a PDF file to their clients on Facebook. Yes, social media and SMS are replacing elements of local connection between people, but it’s far from replacing all online communications (at least for now).

For campaigns and organizations, the fact remains: people don't donate substantial amounts of money on Facebook. Many don’t want their news feed clogged with information about campaigns and nonprofits – nor do they want to announce their political preferences to all their friends. And they don't want to leave social networking sites to take action. The term “slacktivists” has been coined to refer to a new generation of web activists who are only willing to click a “like” button but nothing else.

Or, as @ryannewyork puts it, "Email is Middle Aged". Wait til you're 40, Ryan, then you'll say it's retired.

When Google introduced its Priority Inbox last year, it was with the promise that the system could help us manage our important email more efficiently. Now Google has published a paper on how the Priority Inbox learns what's important, and on how much time that may end up saving users.

The research comes from Douglas Aberdeen, Ondrej Pacovsky and Andrew Slater from Google's Swiss office, and the data comes from Googlers' usage of Priority Inbox - so take the results for what you will. But according to the findings, Priority Inbox users spent 6% less time reading mail overall, and 13% less time reading unimportant mail.

You should be using gmail, and you should turn on priority inbox. They're really good.