Email is dead, long live email!
I had an interesting debate with a good friend recently about whether people prefer to use email or social network messaging to communicate with each other. Personally, I barely know the email address of most of my friends. They’re all on MySpace or Facebook. On Facebook, I never get spam. I get a little on MySpace, but lets face it, compared to the 30 - 50 spam emails I get each day via email, the 1 or 2 MySpace webcam porn messages are not that bad. At least they come with entertaining pictures and copy.
My friend swears people still use email (yes, obviously they do). I still use email, but mostly for business and the occasional friend who hasn’t joined a social network (probably the same friend who still doesn’t have a cell phone). But for casual communication, email is all but dead - social network email is the new black.
Not satisfied with just talking about it, I decided to actually do a little research. I came across some compelling stats. First, as you might expect, teens don’t use email. They either text or social network message. Second, I ran a couple of Facebook polls to see what I’d come up with:
If you have any other evidence to support or discredit this, let me know.
UPDATE: Here’s another great article sent to me by my friend John Bower.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on July 30, 2007 at 5:09 pm Jason Skicewicz wrote:
After thinking about this over the weekend, I do agree that people that join social networks may not have the emails of their so called “friends”. But people join social networking sites to be social within the realm of that site. So an email address is really not something that would be required/needed to be social on that particular site. However, my best friends and the people that I would more than likely want to share photos or other content with (think family), I would most certainly have their email addresses.
I think other poll questions should have been the following:
Do you have most of the email addresses for your closest friends?
Do you have the email addresses for people in your family?
I still believe that email provides the broadest demographic considering the social networks typically cut out anyone over 35. Additionally, the result does not seem to make sense for Facebook users considering you can find the email address of any of your friends. So I guess people were thinking more on the lines of MySpace when answering this poll. But this is a very interesting result in any case, and something that should be considered when building out application software.
on July 31, 2007 at 5:23 am Katharine Osborne wrote:
Email usage in the post-35 set is a bit strange to me. My parents for instance share an email address. I usually don’t know which of them is addressing me until I scroll to the manual sig. My aunt Louise shares a webTV address with her cats (taking catladiness to a whole new plateau), and infrequently spams everyone in the family with political/religious invective that is somehow not connected to her very gentle persona (the cats maybe?)
Anyway, the point is that a lot of older adults are never going to get the social networking thing. They were slow to adopt email, they aren’t ever going to adopt socnet.
I think this lies with the overwhelming number of features on socnet sites. Not saying it is a senior moment thing - but earlier generations were raised to think linearly. One thing happens after another. You read stuff in a line until you are done. You follow a recipe, or a procedure to learn something new (They were raised on 4 TV stations, 3 orders of magnitude less than today’s kids).
Post PC generations were/are raised in an environment of media oversaturation. We are used to handling/prioritizing/sorting/filtering/reorganizing information on the fly. It is an almost entirely unthreaded process.
Build a socnet site that capitalizes on both linear/nonlinear thinking (in a non tiresome manner), and a broader demographic can be captured.
on July 31, 2007 at 11:57 am Lorenz wrote:
The age stats are actually pretty surprising as well. For the “Do you know the email address of most of your social networking buddies question,” we have the following breakdown:
As you might expect, older people tend to know the email addresses of their friends. What’s more interesting is the preference for messaging medium:
I thought that was particularly surprising. It’s important to consider that even though one might know someone’s email address, they may prefer to communicate with that person via social net. For one thing, I get much less spam in my Facebook (i.e. zero spam) than I get in my work mail box (i.e. at least 60 - 100 per day).