Michael Arrington announced it, so I guess it is true, voicemail is dead. In a lengthy rant this afternoon, the Techcrunch editor wrote on the complete uselessness of the medium. All I can say to that is, “Thank You!” Voicemail has been one of my most hated enemies for years now, and I also believe it to be obsolete. At my former position in the VC world, I would regularly fly from SF to NY, and there was nothing I hated more than getting off the plane, turning on my phone and seeing a dozen new voicemails (and not one message ever had significance, just a 30 second waste of my time). With the airlines about to start offering WiFi access on planes, soon enough we will all be able to stay in touch while traveling via email and IM, which should also aid in decreasing our reliance on the outdated voicemail service.

Arrington pointedly suggests the future of voice messages, “More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).”

The more innovative the carriers and mobile applications can be in regard to voicemail, the better it will be for us all.