I stumbled across an entry on Fred Wilson’s A VC blogsite today, entitled “How AOL Ruined Email“. With a title like that, how can you resist reading it? (Go ahead and click on the link; I won’t be insulted. Just come back here when you’re done.) The gist of his message is that

“My kids grew up on AOL. It’s where they first went online. It’s where they learned how to dial up. It’s where they learned how to surf the web. It’s where they learned how to do email, instant messaging, download, build a homepage, etc, etc.

And it’s where they learned to stop using email.”

And the reason they stopped using AOL’s email, Wilson argues, is that on any given day, you might have one legitimate message buried among a hundred spam messages. And as anyone who has ever used AOL in the past few years can confirm, he’s absolutely right, and the reaction of frustration and disgust are pretty common. But the same is true, to a greater or lesser extent, with services like HotMail, Yahoo, and Earthlink.

But I think it’s too simplistic to assert that AOL’s spam-clogged email service is the main reason the younger generation has given up on email altogether. Yeah, maybe there was a time when a teenager was limited by the fact that his parents would pay for only one form of Internet access — so that if AOL provided an unacceptable form of email, there was no alternative available. But since since the late 1990s, more or less, free email has been available from services like Yahoo, HotMail, Google, and others. So if one of them doesn’t work, it’s trivial to switch to some other service.

I think Fred overlooked another hugely important influence on the whole email debate: cell phones. When AOL reached the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s, most teenagers in the U.S. did not have their own cell phones; indeed, not even that many parents had them. As a result, they were generally forced to carry out their Internet-based interactions on a desktop or laptop PC. Obviously, the situation has changed drastically since then; teenagers and adults alike want the ability to communicate (by voice, IM, text-messaging, or email) from a mobile platform, wherever they happen to be located. And on a mobile platform, the user-interface of most email services is clunkier than text-messaging.

One of the folks who posted a comment on Fred’s blog entry made another interesting point: teenagers want the synchronous form of communication associated with IM and texting. Adults in the workplace, on the other hand, want the less-intrusive form of asynchronous communication provided by email. Adults are busy and don’t want to be interrupted; teenagers are bored and do want to be interrupted to find out what their friends are doing.

The interesting question is this: when teenagers grow up, finish high school or college, and enter the work force, will they abandon synchronous texting, and switch over to asynchronous email?