Just The Fax, Ma'am

The Internet is chock full of top-ten lists, enough to make a top ten list for that day's best top-ten lists.

Today's top-ten list of mention, however, comes to us from the folks at MSNBC who dedicated their list to Technologies That Should Be Extinct (But Aren't).

Interestingly, they mention DotLoop's old friend and home buyers' and sellers' fiend, the fax machine. The blurb even mentions the real estate industry as one of the main purveyors of its enduring, screeching noises.

"This endurance," says NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin, "is in part a testament to the failure of digital signatures that would allow us to e-mail certified copies of contracts and similar documents."

Now, that's about as silly as legwarmers. Anyone who has purchased a book through Amazon.com or a Mr. Mister song through iTunes has already used digital signatures. The ESIGN and UETA Acts ensure that contracts signed digitally have just as much validity as a traditional, smeared Bic signature.

As for the fax machine, well, those are about as outdated as Jennifer Grey's old nose.