Will Social Media Kill Email?
Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, recently proclaimed that email is probably going to die. Her rationale is that if you want to know what adults will do tomorrow with technology, you look at what teenagers are doing today, and teenagers think email is kind of, well, “lame.” They prefer social networking and text messaging.
A little too ambitious?
Okay, social media is changing the world, but will it really kill email? In my opinion, no, at least not in the foreseeable future. There are all sorts of reasons why email will live on, but here are my two favorites:
Teenagers don’t conduct business
In the future will people use Facebook to send proposals to clients? To send internal office memos to coworkers? To send an invoice? Could you even imagine using text messages for any of this? Teenagers don’t have any of these needs yet, but they will, which is largely why they don’t use email now, and Facebook seems ill suited for a lot of these purposes.
Besides, even if social media technology renders email antiquated, that doesn’t mean it’s going away, any more than the internet and computers have killed paper.
Teenagers don’t care about privacy
If Facebook kills email, how are you going to sign up for websites (and for that matter, how are you going to sign up for Facebook)? Using your Facebook user/pass instead? Some websites already offer this option, but are you really going to login to your bank, credit card, health insurance or other sensitive websites using your Facebook credentials? Among other problems, this would create a serious privacy hazard — Whoops! Facebook accidentally published every website you logged into and every person you contacted last month, and they sold the info to advertisers!
But do teenagers care about privacy? Absolutely not. Teenagers are famous for publicly posting pictures of themselves with a bottle of Popov vodka in one hand and a stained-glass bong in another, having no concept of how that could impact their careers and reputations down the line.
Adults, on the other hand, care a lot about privacy, which has been Facebook’s biggest problem of late. I just don’t see adults trusting Facebook enough to make it the hub of everything they do on the web, no matter how sensitive, especially given its problems with privacy in the past. If for no other reason, email will stick around as a sort of ID card for the web.
The predictive value of teenagers
Is this really crystal ball insight into future adult behavior?
I’m not going to dismiss wholesale the notion that teenagers predict adult technology trends, but certainly there must be exceptions. It seems that at least with business technology, old habits persist, perhaps even irrationally, and a ton of email’s utility is wrapped up in business.
So if I’m going to accept the “email will die” thesis at all, it’s limited to the possibility that social media will kill social email use, which is already starting to happen. But I doubt email is going anywhere for business, at least in the near future.
So, do you think email is going to die?
June 30th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
[...] Answer: No. June 30, 2010 by Keith Lee Will social media kill e-mail? [...]
June 30th, 2010 at 4:08 pm
In some ways, this question reminds me of Microsoft’s semi-failed 90s experiment with WebTV. They had the right idea of merging TV and internet, they just did it the wrong direction. It ended up that we want to watch TV on our computers, not surf the internet on our TVs.
The same is true with the intersection between social media and email. I think the two will merge in some way we can’t quite anticipate yet. But instead of email being consumed by social media, email systems will begin to incorporate more aspects of social media. Gmail is already experimenting with this in some exciting ways. Wave and Buzz haven’t been hugely successful, but at least Google is constantly thinking of ways to change their email system to keep it updated with what’s going on in social media.
Just like smart phones now combine talk, email, social media, music and photos, future email services will combine messages, social media, and whatever else becomes relevant.
Thanks for the post, Nick.
March 13th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
[...] fact, some agree that social media will continue to grow and make email a thing of the past because teens don’t care about privacy – this generation doesn’t mind posting personal [...]