Sorry, my tongue was in my cheek when I said that.

Have you not encountered the endless "email is dead" and "only old people use email" articles over the last five years? Google those two phrases if you're not familiar with the discussion. Essentially, the same people telling us how fantastic Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, and other "look at me, listen to me, worship me!" services are strongly pushing this idea that only old people use email (and to a certain degree, they implicate this for IM, too in the last couple of years).

So I have to assume that much of this move to include all of these trendy new proprietary communication gimmicks are an attempt to chase the "email is dying, because young people don't use it anymore" tail. To keep the product relevant in a world where it is just accepted that nobody uses or values email communication, anymore. A sort of hedging of bets.

You'll see anecdotes like one author who asked his sister, who is in college, about how she communicates with people.

* “Out of my hundreds of friends, only ONE does not use facebook or myspace.”
* “I only use email to get a hold of old people like you”

Also from an Arstechnica article five years ago summarizing many other reports:

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The Chronicle of Higher Education says that in a study last year, "teenagers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friends and use e-mail to communicate with 'old people.'" The Mercury News says, "For those of you who have just figured out how to zap spam or manage your inbox, prepare for the bad news: E-mail is, like, so yesterday." And then there's USA Today, which makes the claim that "E-mail is so last millennium."

Those are pretty dramatic statements, and they're based in part on last year's Pew Internet & American life study on teen Internet habits. 87 percent of teenagers in the US now use the Internet, and many of them prefer instant messaging to e-mail. According the report, "Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view e-mail as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups."

source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/10/7877.ars

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I don't think using these additional proprietary communication methods are about making people more reachable. You can get email on any device any time and anywhere and it's not reliant on a single systems or content owner, like Twitter or Facebook are. I don't see any other reason to include those things outside of adhering to trends. How is using Facebook messaging in your email client any sort of benefit? You have email. The person with the facebook account also has email. So use email. Facebook is no faster and no more reliable and certainly no more secure or private. But it lets you put a funky little square 'F' facebook logo on your materials when you're marketing your application, I guess.

As for the point about keyboards. I don't know how old you are, but when I was growing up, we didn't have these oversized keyboards with dozens of media buttons. You know, instead of pressing the "launch my email client" button on our keyboard, we just clicked the email client icon (or typed 'mutt/pine/whatever'). If you grew up in the last decade, instead of the 90s (or earlier), you might not remember a time when you didn't have these cheap gimmicky keyboards that somehow are still manufactured and sold almost exclusively. You are already sitting at your computer. Why do you need a special one-function button that does nothing but launch an application or load a specific webpage?

Not sure how what operating systems I use is relevant to appreciating real keyboards like the classic IBM Model M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard) rather than the media-button crammed keyboards of the last decade that are almost all you can find. (However, I use every OS. Windows for gaming, OSX for traveling around, Solaris for work projects, and Slackware and Debian for personal projects).