Is social media going to replace email?

I've been reading a few articles talking about social media such as Facebook replacing emails. Personally though, I feel that they are missing the whole point. Emails and social media functionality is not exactly the same.

What exactly is e-mail? For those people who doesn't know, e-mail stands for electronic mail. What does it replace? Snail mails, the mails that you get in your letter box. Its functionality is exactly the same, but it does it in a much faster, and sometimes in a more reliable manner.

What is social media like Facebook used for then? Again, I think that it evolved from the forums functionality. If you notice, each particular post functions like a forum thread, each having its own thread of discussion.

Of course you can say that these 2 have similar functionality. True, I do not deny that but there is one main difference. Social media is unstructured, while emails are generally structured because it is initiated by someone to a list of known individuals. In social media, you can have several posts all talking about the same thing, with sometimes random people joining in, and good luck if you're trying to search for a particular reply in the thread. Emails on the other hand, does not have this problem thanks to email clients and even the online email services provided free by providers such as Microsoft.

Social media is good for the organisation if you know how to fully exploit the nature of its functionality. Trying to use it for something that's not built for will create problems for yourself. Let's say if you want to use twitter, make sure you push out the information as and when it is released, and not a few hours after it happens. Understand it, before you try to use it.

Replace e-mail with social media? Well, you can try... I just wish the person maintaining the account good luck.