Emails - Advantages and Disadvantages of Electronic Mail
Email is a short word for electronic mail. You create texts and send them over a network of computers. The first emails go back to the 1960s. The invention has influenced our lives and emails have become a popular means of communication.
Advantages of emails
- Emails are easy to use. You can organize your daily correspondence, send and receive electronic messages and save them on computers.
- Emails are fast. They are delivered at once around the world. No other form of written communication is as fast as an email.
- The language used in emails is simple and informal.
- When you reply to an email you can attach the original message so that when you answer the recipient knows what you are talking about. This is important if you get hundreds of emails a day.
- It is possible to send automated emails with a certain text. In such a way it is possible to tell the sender that you are on vacation. These emails are called auto responders.
- Emails do not use paper. They are environment friendly and save a lot of trees from being cut down.
- Emails can also have pictures in them. You can send birthday cards or newsletters as emails.
- Products can be advertised with emails. Companies can reach a lot of people and inform them in a short time.
Disadvantages of emails
- Emails may carry viruses. These are small programs that harm your computer system. They can read out your email address book and send themselves to a number of people around the world.
- Many people send unwanted emails to others. These are called spam mails. It takes a lot of time to filter out the unwanted emails from those that are really important.
- Emails cannot really be used for official business documents. They may be lost and you cannot sign them.
- Your mailbox may get flooded with emails after a certain time so you have to empty it from time to time.
Facebook Celebrates 5th Bithday
Facebook, the worlds biggest social networking site, is celebrating its fifth birthday. In a blog post, the sites founder, Mark Zuckerberg, states that Facebook will continue to work as hard as it has in the last five years in order to stay the webs number one communication site.
The company started in a dorm room in 2004. Today it has 150 million active users, more than the 130 million of rival MySpace.
Facebook is different from other social networking sites because you can communicate with people you really know and trust. Before, most people didnt want to share their real identities online. Facebook has given people a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online. It has changed the way people view the world. A friend from any country is only a few clicks away.
It was back in February 2004 when Zuckerberg started The facebook from a Harvard students room. The aim was to help students get in touch with each other over the Internet. Within 24 hours over a thousand students had signed up and soon after that the network spread out to other universities.
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By 2005 a research study showed that about 85% of the students in the network had a Facebook account. Another survey showed that Facebook was almost as important as an iPod.
At the end of 2005 Facebook came to the U.K. and up to today the site has been translated into 35 languages.
Five years after its start Facebook has escaped the universities and colleges. More than half of its users are not at college anymore and the fastest growing group are the 30 to 40 year olds. Every day 15 million users update their profiles to tell their friends and the world whats happening to them. They also share photos, upload videos, chat, make friends, join groups and simply have fun.
4. Are We Ready for E-Books?
In a typical Boston bookshop customers move their way through the corridors and rooms to browse through thousands of books that are spread over two floors. Its a lot of paper says one of the shop assistants. She admits that the store could get much smaller if the digital revolution gets to the bookshelves.
The catchword is e-book, or electronic book - something you read on screen instead of on paper. You can load books onto small computers to read while you are on the move.
There are lots of different e-books. Some are really computers and may even be bound in leather to look like a real book. The RocketBook, for example, is a portable that can display pages. Others are just computer programs which you can use to display books on your computer or notebook.
Then there are PDAs, or pocket computers, that can be used as an e-book if you have the right software. They are portable and have wireless connections to libraries or bookstores.
E-books have many advantages:
- You can store lots of books on one computer.
- You can mark your book with an electronic bookmark.
- You can change the size of the type or font
- Some e-books have built in dictionaries so you can click on a word and find out what it means.
- And of course e-books can also include pictures, sound clips or small videos.
Some people think that e-books will replace printed books in the near future. For dictionaries and encyclopedias this is already true. Wikipedia, for example, gives you more than a multivolume encyclopaedia can give you.
The e-book industry, however, still faces many problems. There are many different types of formats for e-books, and the book you may want to read may not be available in a certain format. Publishers develop their own format so that the reader has to download their books.
Microsoft Reader is one of the e-book formats that allow you to get books from other companies to read on your machine. Recently Sony has started a worldwide campaign on the digital book sector. The Sony Reader is a handheld device that has been on the market for just about a year. It is about the size of a paperback and can also store PDFs, photos and music. The battery lasts about 7500 pages before you have to recharge it. It can hold 80 books in its memory. Sonys new invention weighs about 200 grams, is 2 cm thick and has a 15 cm long screen. It costs about 240 .
Amazon has developed a small device called the Kindle. It can display books, magazines and newspapers. Users can download thousands of books found in the Amazon store.
Major publishers, like Random House, think that as consumers are doing more work on computers every day, they may also be reading more books on screen as well. Right now the company offers about 6,000 e-books. They cost about 2 a book which is much lower than the price of a paperback. The high costs of paper books are caused by printing and distribution.
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5. Google's Future is Chrome
The worlds number one search engine, Google, has developed a new operating system called Chrome. It automatically connects the user to the internet where people write their letters, emails, post their photos and do many other things they would normally do on a desktop OS.
The development of Chrome started in 2008 when Google built its own browser, also called Chrome. Today 12% of net community uses it regularly.
Google thinks that the operating systems of today, Windows, Apples MacOS and Linux are old fashioned and do not meet the needs of the people. Computer users of today we spend most of their time on the net and not with a desktop application.
Googles vision of the next generation computer goes even further. It wants to put its Chrome OS on laptops and netbooks, so that the user just pushes a button and automatically gets connected. Chromes main aim is speed. It wants to make the computer fast. The first tests on netbooks showed that you could get connected to the internet within seven seconds from startup. Chrome OS skips everything from starting up the PC to getting connected.
Google also wants to make a computer cheaper. People who buy computers today often have to buy the operating system, anti-virus software and office programs before they can really work with it. This kind of software often costs hundreds of dollars. With these applications on the web you wouldnt need to buy such expensive programs.
Chrome is not the first operating system that comes from the search engine. Android is already successful on tablet PCs and smartphones.
Windows is still the most successful operating system. Windows 7 has become very popular after the failure of its predecessor Vista. But this may change. By 2012 laptop and major netbook manufacturers are expected to offer machines with Chrome OS preinstalled.
Not everyone will use Google OS. Gamers will avoid it because need better hardware and those that use high-tech software will also stick to normal PCs. But for many normal users, pressing the button and getting connected to your Facebook account may soon become reality
