The shape of email to come
This is an interesting article from the Chicago Tribune discussing Nielsen research:
Here’s today’s big news in fewer than 140 characters: Social networking is now more popular than e-mail.
That’s the official word from a new round of Nielsen research, which shows “member communities” such as Twitter and Facebook have overtaken personal e-mail to become the fourth-most-popular way people spend time online (after search, portals and software applications).
This made me think about my own use of email outside of work. Just taking a quick scan of my email I can make the following generalizations:
- 5% - Email conversations that couldn’t (yet) be done via a different medium (e.g., Dissertation work, emails from family and friends not using social networking sites)
- 10% - Automated billing confirmations, Amazon/eBay/iTunes “Thank you for buying” emails
- 85% - Notifications from Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking websites
Interestingly, almost all of the online conversations that I have now happen within the confines of these social networking sites. And it’s no wonder. Using Facebook as an example, all of those conversations are much more contextual than email. Conversations happen around groups, events, photos, posted items, etc. It’s a much richer user experience than email and there really hasn’t been any added complexity with the increase in functionality we see with most things in our lives these days.
Looking at my own emailing behaviors, and that of my peers, I have to wonder - what does the future hold for email? I find myself using it less and less for personal communications (that 5% figure above), and increasingly as a collection point for the myriad of notifications that I receive (95%). If I were to look back in time 3-5 years, these numbers would be drastically different. Looking at the Nielsen summary, it’s safe to say this trend is likely to continue.
So what then for email? My guess would be that there will be less time focused on refining authoring tools for users, and more attention given to the integration, classification, storage and findability of notifications/alerts. Whatever the trend is, I’ll wager that we’ll see it in Google Labs before too long…
Site Transition (Almost) Complete
Transitioning this site from Joomla to Wordpress went off (almost) without a hitch. In the transition the comments to all of the posts on this site were lost, I wasn’t able to keep the same URLs for posts, and currently, each of the posts has random questions marks floating in them.
Also, if I’ve managed to flood your feed reader with lots of old posts in the process, I do apologize!
Other than that, things should be back to normal and I can get back to posting regularly now that I don’t have to do so by hacking my blogging platform…
Networking vs. Notworking
Yet another gem from PHDcomics below, which comments on the ‘value’ of facebook.? As a member of Gen-Y I think I’m supposed to be ashamed of the fact that I don’t have or want a facebook account, but my general feeling is that the time spent on facebook is inversely proportional to the amount of time I could spend doing more valuable/interesting things.? Does that make me an online networking troglodyte, or is there actually something valuable/interesting about facebook that I’m missing here?
I wonder what the comic would look like for a Social-Notworking-Analysis…