Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sparked a firestorm this week with her bold assertion that email “is probably going away.”
But she’s not the first to make this claim. Just do a quick Google search, and you’ll find plenty of bloggers warning of email’s demise. (You’ll also find loads of puns saying we should “Google Wave” goodbye to email–so much for that.) Even the Wall Street Journal published an article last year arguing that Facebook and Twitter were now king among online communication tools (“Email has had a good run…but its reign is over”), echoing Sandberg’s beliefs.
Is email really finished?
According to Sandberg, only 11% of teens email daily, a statistic she sees as a sign of the coming transition to SMS and social networks. But in 2005, another study found that less than 5% of American teens aged 12-17 preferred email over instant messaging for digital communication. Now, five years later, many of those teens are entering the business world–but we haven’t seen AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and G-Chat overtake good old-fashioned email.
At least not yet.
A study by the Nielsen Co. of email consumption in Australia, Brazil, several European countries, and the U.S., found that usage rose 21% between August 2008 to August 2009, reaching 276.9 million people. During that same period, users of social-network sites leaped 31% to 301.5 million people. Because of this sharp growth, Internet communities like Facebook are eating away at the amount of time users spend communicating through traditional messenging services: Between 2003 and 2009, time spent on email sites dropped 41%; social networks, on the other hand, now represent 22% of total user Internet time–up 24% since last year.
