In May 2011, a US Magistrate Judge talking at an eDiscovery
event in London said that email's days of dominance were
numbered. The next phase, he said, would be dominated by people
sending short messages to each other and chatting. It would make
discovery extremely difficult.
That was two months before Snapchat launched. WhatsApp was two
years old. Instagram was a year old and did not add messaging until
2013. Slack launched two years later. The judge's comments were
prophetic.
Back in 2011, people still wrote in whole sentences on a handful
of formats and platforms, and IT still had some control of the
devices attached to networks. But SMS, launched in 1992, was
forming an ever-larger proportion of communications, aided by
phones and tablets with keyboards. Simple messaging grew into
real-time conversations, which could be private or public, in
closed groups or open to all. Communication platforms crowded the
market, whether dedicated (like WhatsApp) or
