Valleywag
When Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook, we told you the real losers were AOL and Yahoo, because they depend on email usage to drive traffic through their portals. Email is dying as a form of communication, we said, but some smartass commenter didn't believe us. He wanted to see some numbers. Fine. Here are some numbers from Hitwise.
A disclaimer: we know that over there in the U.K., they drive on the wrong side of the road. So maybe the Internet confuses them as well. But the Brits are ahead of us in broadband penetration. If their online behavior is any indication of where things are going for email, AOL, Yahoo and other portals are in as much trouble as we thought.
Comments
You're reading it wrong. Email's stayed relatively constant even as social networking has become substantially ore popular. The only thing that graph demonstrates is that something recently happened to account for a 15% drop in email usage. Or at least to their metric of it.
And isn't it worth noting that the entire pie (the number of hours spent online, the number of users, etc) probably grew during this two year period? So email actually has more users than it has ever had before.
Regardless-- Nick's idea is ridiculous-- except for people like Scoble, who in their right mind would use Facebook for every day business communication?
Yes, you're reading it wrong. The charts don't say email is 'dying' as a form of communication; network stats suggest it is increasing (even after filtering out the spam traffic). I would also look deeper into how Hitwise obtains it metrics. If it's anything like Alexa, I would flush their metrics down the toilet.
Another factor in decreasing email usage can be SMS texting, which here in Europe is an important form of communication. Europeans have long used it before it was even available in North America.
We don't want to hear about your "logic" and "reason!" That would take away from our histrionics!
Also, that chart is measuring webmail and thus doesn't include standard email.
Basically it come down to this: old farts (age 30+) e-mail. Young folks (under 30) text. And texting in many other regions (Asia, Europe) is much higher than that of the U.S.
It's actually a rather interesting argument. With mobile phones increasingly using advanced technology to access social networking sites what will email be used for? However, at the moment people can't send attachments through a social networking such as MySpace and there is always the worry of security. I believe email is used just as much today as it was when it first was widely accepted however I believe it's used differently.
Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a scaffolding collapse on Vernon Blvd. and 51st Ave. in Queens, an unstable building on East 102nd St. in Manhattan, and a homicide on Tompkins Ave. in Brooklyn.
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