Email loses its cool?

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches reactions to a study suggesting that email is no longer "popular." Not to mention unrelated pictures...

Sha-ron Gau-din re-ports:

Move over e-mail ... Used by two-thirds of all worldwide online users, social networks and blogs have become the fourth most popular online products, according to a report released yesterday by Nielsen Online. The report lists e-mail as No. 5 on the list of users' favorite online tools. Search tools, portals and PC software topped the list.
...
The report also noted that for every 11 minutes that people spend online, one is devoted to a social networking site. And social networks aren't just for the teenage set anymore. Nielsen showed that the largest increase in users came from the 35-to-40-year-old age group.

[Seriously, CW eds: it's 2009. Who still hyphenates "email"?]

Jack Schofield is hip to the compound word, you dig?

A Nielsen Online report says two thirds of us now use what it calls "Member Communities," which includes both social networks and blogs. MCs now make up "the fourth most popular category online – ahead of personal email."
...
It's easy enough to understand the shift towards social networking from email. Email has a huge spam problem, and efforts to stop spam frequently block legitimate messages. It's quicker to use Twitter, Facebook or an instant messaging service and there's less chance your message will be lost or blocked.

But Elise Ackerman points to different data:

According to Hitwise, a traffic measurement firm, visits to Google’s Gmail, long the smallest of the big online e-mail services, are accelerating. For the last two weeks, U.S. Internet visits to Gmail surpassed visits to YouTube ...Here are the latest rankings of the most popular Web sites from Hitwise for the week of March 7:

Google: 6% of all U.S. Internet visits
Yahoo Mail: 5 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
Yahoo: 3 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
MySpace: 3 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
Facebook: 2 percent of all U.S. Internet visits.

Hitwise's Heather Dougherty adds:

Gmail’s top 3 sources of traffic were Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! Mail, totaling 58% in February 2009. Google accounts for the largest share of upstream traffic at 49%, which has increased 10% from February of last year. Facebook represents just over 4% of the upstream traffic and this share has nearly doubled when compared to the previous year.

The third source of traffic, Yahoo! Mail, presumably from Internet users with multiple web-based email accounts, sent fewer referrals in Feb 2009 and the share declined 18%.

Hi, Tim High. Where's the IT angle?

Lately I’ve been looking into Web 2.0-type tools to improve our commumication and workflow at work. There’s been some Enterprise 2.0 buzz about Twitter as a possible tool for communication on projects, and I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out exactly how. One problem with Twitter is that it is wide out in the open, for anyone to read. If loose lips sink ships, Twitter is the Bermuda Triangle of company secrets. It hardly seems wise to be encouraging your employees to discuss the intacies of internal projects in such an open forum.

I recently came across Yammer, which is an enterprise-friendly version of Twitter. Basically, it’s the same thing, but your comments are only visible to members of your “company” (currently defined by the domain name of your email address) ... [But] perhaps Yammer’s value is no more that of Twitter: good for connecting the Web 2.0 addicts of your business in chaotic an unpredictable ways. Which is great for a fortune 500 enterprise, but sure feels lonely for us small guys.

And Stewart Meagher cries, "Long live social notworking":

Time-wasting twaddle sites like Facebook and Myspace are now taking up more of our time than traditional email.
...
A [Nielsen] spokesurveyor said some stuff about "global online experience" and "member communities," but we were too busy dreaming up a new website called FaceBoot where you would make spiteful and outrageously libelous comments about all of the people you'd really like to kick in the teeth.

And finally...

• Picture is Unrelated
  [it's OK right now, but reasonable chance of non-work-safe imagery in future]

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Apple netbook... or notbook?
• Stephen's Wolfram Alpha: snake oil or Skynet?
• TomTom fights Microsoft to protect GPL?
• ...more

Buffer overflow:

• Savio Rodrigues: Is Red Hat a software firm or a financial institution?
• Thinking Out Cloud: Cloud Pricing and Application Architecture
• The Aquarium: What's new in OpenMQ 4.3? UMS!
• Henry Blodget: AOL Layoffs In Progress
• Matt Brunk: Kindle 2: Life Altering Technology
• Christopher Lawton: Now That I'm Dead, Who's Going to Update My Facebook Status?

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Seth Weintraub: Twitter application gets rejected from App Store
• Robert L. Mitchell: Gmail failure: Google not to blame
• Seth H. Weintraub: Gmail and Google Hosted Email is down
• SJVN: Get over it! There's no Apple netbook
• Michael Horowitz: Using a $260 netbook as a desktop
• Eric Lundquist: Where are the tech jobs?
• Shark Tank: That would explain it
• Shark Bait: Too confusing
• ...more

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.