Upload a photo of your own version on your instant messaging program of choice in the comments. You can attach a photo directly inside your comment. Best submission gets a trip to HR. [Flickr]

You might someday send resumes or other important documents over Facebook and Twitter, but Email is never going to be "dead". In fact, with push email on your phone, it's basically as instant as any of the other networks.

Google Wave might also be pretty interesting when the people pimping it out call it what email would look like if it were invented today. It's too early to tell. But for it to be truly ubiquitous—and it has to be in order to replace email—it can't be hosted by just one company.

Think of it this way: if people are still using Fax machines—fucking FAX MACHINES—on a daily basis, there's no way that Email will be excised from our collective productivity streams. Not when it's this much more usable by the average person than faxes.

Lastly, how did they come up with the number of social network subscriptions being higher than email, when all social networks require you to sign up with an email account? [WSJ]

Ping is designed to look like the SMS app, and behaves much the same way. The messages you send arrive at the recipient's screen instantly—similar to IMs—but also pop up with a Push Notification if you're not actively using the phone.

It's basically free SMS for you to everyone who has an iPhone or iPod Touch (over Wi-Fi) as long as you can convince them to sign up for Ping. Even if you can't, the ones you do switch over might be enough for you to downgrade your SMS plan one notch to save some money.

In the end, this may either be a really useful SMS alternative for iPhones, or a service that's not different enough from SMS or IM that people will use it. It's too early to say. [Ping on iTunes via Gear Live]

Update: If you have questions, you can contact support@pingmessaging.com.

The app does what was touted this year at the iPhone 3.0 event: display notifications when the app is closed, show you how many outstanding messages you have and basically keep you "connected" to the AIM service even when you're not actively using the app. The free version is here and the pay version is here.

We personally would go with the free version until the pay version of the better IM apps (Beejive, for example) go live. Boy Genius says it's live now, but we're still seeing the old version in the store. [TechCrunch]

[Image via Flickr]

Currently, you can connect to "AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN/Live, Myspace IM, and Yahoo messenger" with Beejive. With 2.0, you can send in-line photos, audio and video files, PDFs and Office docs to anyone you're chatting with, provided the recipient has an IM client from the last 10 years.

The best part is the voice message feature, which you can activate with the microphone icon. The worst part is the price: $16. You do get what you pay for, and Beejive seems to be a pretty fancy IM app. [App Store via TUAW]

The findings go against popular opinion, which says SMS and IM are the devil, and will lead to the downfall of today's youth. Next to traipsing on people's lawns, IMing friends instead of going outside to play is the leading cause of the breakdown in parent-teenager relations today, according to a phone call with my mom earlier this morning.

However, as Hancock and company discovered, not only is this opinion untrue, the emotions presented in virtual conversations are just as contagious at times as real world interaction.

The experiment involved 44 pairs of volunteers, who chatted online for 15 to 20 minutes. Hancock asked them to ask questions about one another, including one issue that was bothering them at the time. But here's the hitch: Hancock had one person from each pair watch a harrowing scene from Sophie's Choice. The other person watched a clip of some "small talk."

What the team discovered was that not only did the participants accurately assess their partner's mood, but that those who were paired with someone who had watched Sophie's Choice felt worse off than before the chat. Those participants who watched the car hood scene in Transformers, however, had the irresistible urge to mate following the IM interaction*

*I made this part up. [New Scientist]

Playback can be initiated automatically or manually depending on your preference, and if your chosen client does not support PTT, the message will be delivered as a link that the recipient can follow. Whether you are into PTT or not, it is a nice addition to an app that won't cost you a dime. [Comunicano via BGR]

There were a handful of multi-client IM apps available via Installer, my personal favorite being Fring, which also has the ability to do VoIP calls over Wi-Fi. You can count on Apple putting the kibosh on Fring in the App Store unless it drops the VoIP feature due to SDK guidelines, which is a shame.

Palringo on its own sports a nice interface (which is a little jerky at times, though), and it tosses all of your new messages via any client into a universal inbox in the bottom-left corner. Like the official AIM client, it vibrates on message receipts, even if your phone is locked (and Palringo is still active, of course, which is another thing the Jailbreak apps had on it). On other platforms, Palringo supports voice chat over its supported protocols as well (not VoIP)—that feature's not in the iPhone version yet, but is forthcoming says the devs. [Palringo, App Review Marathon]

AM is extremely easy to set up and has lots of options so you can choose which contacts you see. It supports Gtalk and AIM protocols in addition to ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and Jabber. AM even logs your IM sessions so you can refer back to old conversations. But best of all, it keeps your IM conversations going, even when you are on a call or out of the program, and sends Mail style notifications alerting you to how many IMs came your way while you were gone. All in all, an extremely good experience for IMing on the go, so jailbreak if you haven't yet, and install this puppy. [Google via Lifehacker]