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You've seen our charts which show how email's dominance is fading. Yesterday, Slate came to the same conclusion, citing a 2005 Pew study, which reports that nearly half of Web-using teenagers prefer instant messaging to email. Slate also dug up last year's news from ComScore's that teen email use was down 8 percent. The cause?

Slate writer Chad Lorenz decides that teens still use email, but only for certain kinds of communication. Some messages are better conveyed through texts, IM or Facebook wall posts. Doesn't this kind of analysis make Yahoo and Google's talk of "Inbox 2.0," the notion that email can form the basis of new social networks, all the more gloriously late to the party?