Prince is wrong

Prince made the claim in Britain's Daily Mirror. Ah, the Mirror, a tabloid that will give away copies of his newest album. A newspaper, giving away CDs, but the Internet is dead.

Anyway, leaving aside my counterclaim that Prince's career has been moribund for two decades, to my mind it's not the Internet that's doomed but traditional communications like the telephone.

VoIP ( "Voice over Internet Protocol") services like Skype and the brand-new Google Voice threaten the telephone company's power over both residential and business customers by providing easy-to-use, free or cheap, and reliable communication options. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I reckon readers won't be terribly upset at the idea of paying less to Ma Bell.

Online meetings are in real-time, without delays in sending and receiving messages; video sharing allows face-to-face interaction between businesses and clients; computer screens can be shared to enable remote work on team projects.

In practical teams, business travel is now less important, even redundant -bad for airlines and gas companies, good for everyone else's corporate bottom line (and for the environment).

Internet telephony for businesses now focuses on "unified communications," integrating formerly discrete services like voice calls and mail, faxes, messaging, e-mail, and conferencing into one package, eliminating the need to pay for separate services and equipment.

The same way from Skyping

Not-for-profit organizations benefit in the same way from Skyping. Charities, volunteer boards, and political parties (hint hint), all groups that need to keep costs low and the membership of which is geographically scattered, should consider VoIP options.

And we may, in fact, be in the midst of a giant evolutionary leap over not just the telephone but e-mail and even Facebook, in the form of the Ning platform that allows users to create their own social networks.

So, I beg to differ with Prince; the Internet isn't dead. Instead, the desire to streamline connectivity while reducing expenses for consumers and corporations alike has led to a mortal threat not to the Internet but to traditional ways and means of communication.