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.

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?