Is email on the way out?
According to Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of social networking
site Facebook, email is a dying form of communication.
“If you want to know what you’ll be doing tomorrow” said Sandberg at the Neilsen Consumer 360 Conference in Las Vegas, “look at what teens are doing today”.
Sandberg claims that only 11 percent of teenagers today are sending emails on a daily basis, preferring instead to use text messages or social networking sites to communicate with others.
Now, according to a report by technology market research firm the Radicati Group, email use is actually on the up and will increase from over 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion over the next 4 years.
However, they also say that Social Networking is currently the fastest growing communication technology among both consumers and business users and will grow from over 2.1 billion accounts this year, to over 3.6 billion by 2014.
Instant messaging is also growing in popularity, again with both consumers and business users and Radicati predict that there will be over 3.5 billion IM accounts across the world by 2014.
So is email going to die a death? Well it’s hard to believe that at the moment but let’s face it, very few of us actually write a hand written letter today and who could have foreseen that a few years ago?
Sandberg also said at the conference that Facebook is now by far the number one application on every device from “the iPhone, to Rim, to the Android across the world”.
Ok so it’s in Sandberg’s best interest to promote Facebook and she may well want to believe that email will die and we’ll all use Facebook to get in touch with anyone else for whatever reason.
However, as the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, there are some problems with Sandberg’s argument.
Sandberg appears to have got her information on teens using email from the Pew Internet Research statistics, which did in fact state that 11 percent of teens use email on a daily basis, but that was to communicate with friends; however, they also found that 68 percent of teens use email “at least occasionally”. Also, teens were never big on using email in the first place.
The difference is that teenagers use Facebook for communicating with friends socially and use email to interact with adults and institutions. Will these teens suddenly revert to using email in a few years time? I doubt it.
You know, I think email in its present form may well disappear into the realms of history, just not yet. What do you think?
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