23 Musings

Yes they could according to this great satirical post on Google Blogoscoped! The end result is below but read the article, it's well worth it!

For the first time the new darlings of the web (social networks) have overtaken the old darling (web based email) in the traffic stakes. Hitwise have a report showing the upward trend for the social networks and the rate at which they have caught up the likes of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

So, are users now using social networks instead of email? Well yes they are , naturally, they are a quick way to converse with close friends especially to groups of friends. And they're more fun to use, something email providers will have to address (OpenSocial and Gmail perhaps?). However, email still has it's place and the demographic data from Hitwise shows that unsurprisingly it's the younger users who visit social networks more.

One factor we should also consider is that email is something that you visit a few times a day maybe (unless the web is your life) where as users tend to browse social networks for long periods so the traffic is bound to be higher.

Interesting one this... A friend just sent me this url which takes you to a new service from Google called Shared Stuff. At first glance it looks like a Delicious'esque social bookmarking tool, in fact that's exactly what it looks like.

Shared Stuff is really easy to use. Drag an 'email/share' button to your browser toolbar and start clicking when on a page you want to share. Links can include images and text extracts and also comments. You can view the resulting page directly or RSS it or even iGoogle it. You can also cross post from Shared Stuff to services such as Delicious, Furl or Facebook. You can invite people to view your Shared Stuff by email and Gmail contacts can view too.

Now why would Google go to the trouble of creating a 'me too' app (something they're not that known for?

Now, think a bit deeper about this tool and how it could relate to other Google apps and services. Shared docs, spreadsheets, email, web searches, Google gadgets, links, news etc etc. Clearer? Makes sense to me, this could (potentially) become the way users really collaborate and share not just bookmarks (as this looks now) but also all other Google services. It's all very well integrated and could become a real hub for collaboration (if they've thought of that). Of course it could just be Google bookmarks Mk2...

In the news today Google has come out to say that usage of it's mobile services have soared during the summer months. Usually the summer months can see a dip in web usage and perhaps this is evidence that users are getting more comfortable with the small screen so continuing to use it when on the move.

Visits to Google's maps, Gmail and mobile searches on mobile phones and wireless handheld devices rose 35 percent between May and June. Thats a reverse of last years pattern which saw a decline at that time of year.

They attribute a jump in use of 40 percent to the launch of the iPhone. However I know that it's widely used in the UK too and we don't have the iPhone yet.

This is definitely all about better handsets being available, more people having decent handsets and the public at large getting more savvy with ways of accessing the web. I'd expect it to keep rising rapidly. For the UK, we've had such a poor summer weather wise that I'm surprised that usage hasn't shifted back to PC's, the test will be when we have a decent summer (we can pray that may be next year...).

In this blog post Facebook have announced that they are opening up their email features a little.

The new functionality allows users to email any email address direct from their Facebook account (rather than just emailing those on their friends lists). This is a very shrewd move and will result in Facebook being able to add lots of non-members to other members email lists, a nice little bit of marketing collateral!

It's hardly ging to make you move away from GMail or Hotmail but it will be interesting to see where this goes next. If they add storage and a proper email interface it could become a contender very quickly.

Facebook would sit quite naturally as a universal communications platform, IM integration next maybe?

Much has been made of the feature with GMail where you can attach the storage associated it as a network drive. Rumours were flying around last year that Google would launch a storage product called GDrive, Techcrunch is now carrying a story about that and debating whether it will now happen.

Interesting news out today that Adobe may be considering jumping into the office productivity market in the future. Now that they have the Adobe AIR runtime platform they have a perfect framework for creating desktop apps that have online connectivity. That would seem a natural framework for creating an on/offline synchronising suite of office tools.

Adobe AIR is a fascinating product as it gives you all the power and potential of the internet right on your desktop. Maybe Google will buy Adobe and port it's Apps, Docs and Gmail onto the AIR platform (as I blogged about yesterday)?