With all the buzz around social media (and notably so), industry analysts are declaring email a thing of ‘the past’ and that social media applications, namely sites like Twitter and Facebook, will take over as our online method of communications.
As technology evolves, it drives the habits of consumers. Remember the Betamax vs. VHS fight? That was followed by Blu-ray beating out HD DVD. Sure, those examples clearly show that a player got wiped out but I see it more as an evolution. The emergence of train-plane-automobile didn’t stop people from walking or biking. They evolved as travelers’ needs changed and were presented as choices.
With the advent of email, snail mail was predicted to die. Agreed, we don’t post as many personal letters; however, sites like eBay, Amazon and Etsy rely on getting mailed goods to consumers. Mail providers evolved to meet and adapt to these changing needs. The same thing goes for email. Now when I’m thinking of reaching out to someone I am presented with several choices: I can send an SMS, a tweet, a Facebook message or wall post, or an email. Depending on my need, I will choose the appropriate medium. Email is universal, whereas not all my friends/colleagues/family use the same technology.
We still need an email to register for most sites: Email is like our online digital passport: it gives us access to these sites and serves as a means of identifying and validating ourselves online. I have yet to see a site that doesn’t require some sort of email validation for signing up.
The ‘pull’ factor: Email is still used to draw us back to these sites. For every Facebook wall comment or photo tag, and every direct message I get on Twitter, I get an email notification that draws me back to those sites. The Radicati Group predicts that ‘Worldwide, email traffic will total 247 billion messages per day in 2009. By 2013, this figure will almost double to 507 billion messages per day.’
Email is a long way from being extinct. Your thoughts?
I definitely agree with you Sandy. Though Social Medias and Email share the same function (Communications), they are completely separate in terms of scope, reachability, and objectives.
I particularly like your analogy with walking vs. train/plane/automobile.
There is a lack of support here for most social media web sites, due to two reasons: they are a major source of wasted time and secondly, they prevail over email in the ability to get users to download and install malware onto their desktops. Our company has initially chosen to shut off access to these sites. This will not stand long and I envision controlled access will come about.
I don’t believe in one size fits all (The problem with bucket seats is that not everyone has the same size bucket!). I don’t believe that email will completely go away, in as much as these web sites will take over all correspondence. There need to be a healthy balance and IS will be required to support the many forms of communication. For IS to stand firm and stay soley with email means a lack of understanding on how our customers communicate. We need to maintain a multiple pathways, enabling those technologies that we can reliably support and control the negative side affects, wherever possible.
An interesting comment on email and social networks. I do not see Emails dying so easily, it is at the most least valuable for getting notifications from the networks. On the other side, security issues are moving into social networks area and become a target for the attackers.
I don’t think that Facebook or Twitter would replace email. They aren’t designed for that.
However, I just got invited to Google Wave, and I must say that I’m impressed. It elegantly combine email and instant messaging together, making both email and MSN-like software obsolete.
According to the Wikipedia article, Google Wave was actually designed to replace email, which they consider outdated. I’m not saying it will replace email overnight. But it has great potential.
Sandy, I couldn’t agree with you more. My teenagers do not use email very often, if you ask them they will tell you ‘Email is Old School’ – however, I believe they will realize the importance of email as they get older.
Some years ago I read the book ‘The Road Ahead’ by Bill Gates, in it, Gates says that we will all have to learn to be better information managers or suffer the consequences of ‘information overload’. I already see it, as a business owner and an elected official I receive over 200 email messages per day, now most of them do not require a response, i.e. mailing lists, 1 way communications, etc!however; ‘going through my email’ has become a chore that starts in the morning and ends in the evening. Because of this, email has become more like work, than play. I believe this is the real reason why my wife and I dread having to ask our boys if they replied to the email they received from their grandma.
Thanks for the blog post, I look forward to reading more.
Social networks have made online communication easier and faster than ever before. But they fall short in many areas that email is still strong.
– conversations: every tried to manage a long conversation on Twitter? How about a multi-party conversation?
– collaboration: portals and document management systems extend this but email still underpins a lot of collaboration, especially between separate entities
– security: you have a much greater chance, not to mention actual options for doing it properly, of securing email as compared to Twitter or Facebook messages. Try encrypting a Tweet. Try trusting Facebook to keep your privacy settings private, and not abitrarily change them at a later date.
– auditing: no brainer, social networks don’t open the kimono if you need to do an audit on messages, check deliverability, anything of that sort. Not without a court order anyway, which can be expensive to obtain and there are international jurisdiction issues that come up.
– unified comms: where does Twitter and Facebook fit into the emerging unified comms picture that is becoming critical to businesses? It doesn’t.
My various cents.