Warren Ellis said the following in his latest Bad Signal email:

Sometimes I wonder why, in the
age of ubiquitous webcams and
dozens of services, I don’t get
more videomail or audiomail.
You’d think everyone would have
a media-mail account — a separate
Gmail account, or a Mailbucket
account hooked up to an RSS
reader. But no. I mean, I’m a
writer, I’ll happily plonk along
with just words until my hands
turn into claws. But even services
like Seesmic just seem like passing
toys for the digerati, rather than
strong solutions for videomail.

I say email’s dead or at least broken. See In-Box Zero and people declaring Email Bankruptcy.

Email is no longer where “it’s at”; where the conversations flow. It’s just become the new SnailMail – full of bills, advertising and letters from your olds.

So where do you find video and audio “mail”?

Twitter of course! 😛

• Audio mail = Twitterfone. (see also: TwitterGram, Chirrp)
• Video mail = Seesmic (see also: ustream, qik).
• Photo mail = Zannel.

All of which sit quite nicely on top of Twitter. We haven’t quite got payloads, more like piggybacking.

I think part of the reason that people are far from abandoning Twitter is that not only is that where the core conversation is taking place, where the people are, but it’s also become a vital piece of middleware for a wide range of services sitting on top of it (see also BrightKite).

Which means that a client that parses out the piggybacked information and turns into more of a payload (ie making the pictures/video/audio accessible within the client, rather than requiring loading via a browser) will seriously freakin’ pwn all others IMHO.