More Rumours of the Death of Email
Every now and then someone will poke their head and claim that email is dying or is dead. Almost two years ago Business Week predicted the death of email 
and the rise and rise of IM, wikis and blogs in its place. A year before that technology pundit Stowe Boyd forecasted that 2004,
will be the year when it becomes truly obvious … that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.
Now ValleyWag has dredged up the first actual statistics that I have seen, in defence of its claim that “email is dying as a form of communication”:
I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there are least two things to say about this “evidence” from Valleywag.
- The chart displays the amount of traffic – or “hits” – to email services and to social web sites. The number of times a person visits his or her email service provider may not be a safe indicator of the value that person places upon email, nor of the frequency with which email or other forms of online communication are used. All it shows is that people in the UK now visit social web sites more often than they visit their email service providers, which is… well…. unsurprising.
- The general trend is not one of social web visits supplanting visits to email service providers, but of supplementing them. As the social web site traffic grows, visits to email service provider do not decline by a corresponding amount for most of the graph.
If there is eveidence for the death of email, this is not it.
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Tags: email, facebook, Internet, not apple mail, social web, web 2.0
November 9th, 2007 at 1:20 am
I’m performing an experiment the week after next. I’m taking a week off of email – I’ll use audio/video to respond to messages as well as social network messaging. No Ims either. We’ll see how it goes.
November 9th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Acutally, looking at that graph, it looks like email is holding pretty steady even though social networking is on the rise.
Sure, the very last datapoint shows a bit of a decline, but statistically, you need more data points beyond the last one to see if there is a trend forming or not.
November 9th, 2007 at 2:38 am
As with most “surveys” the reality is largely based on the group being surveyed and how the survey was framed.
The chart doesn’t really show much of a dip in email use, rather it may be of a short term blip as people experiment with social networking.
I believe that as they discover the limitations of social networking (aka the signal to noise ratio is consierably higher) and are inundated with advertising, games and pointless self-promotional efforts by those networks, that email, im and text messaging will be reinvigorated.
November 9th, 2007 at 6:52 am
@Jane — I’d be interested to hear the results of your experiment. Will you blog it somewhere?