Social Media Triumphing Over Email

Is email turning into an internet dinosaur?

A Nielsen study published yesterday suggests this might be the case. For the first time, social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have surpassed email in popularity amongst internet users. Find the whole report here.

Frankly, the news is far from surprising me. I often keep in touch faster with facebook than with email. Email is just too official sometimes and requires too much 'conception', while dropping a few lines to a friend's account is fast, easy and informal. The other problem is with email itself: it just hasn't progressed at all since a few years back when Yahoo and Google were still fighting for email supremacy. Nobody seems to have taken any interest in improving email, apart from giving you more and more space to accumulate more and more junk in a seemingly boundless internet space. I might be the only one now to advocate for Internet Ecology. I mean, is it really a good thing to fill the internet with junk you don't look for in years and years? Never mind that, it's a whole other topic.

Still, I think email should survive as a means of formal communication. It is well suited for job applications and formal discussions. Except that, if the giants Yahoo, Google and the like lose interest in developing it (like it seems they already have), email may end up dying an early death.