CLIP Social Networking Now More Popular Than Email, Report Finds

Ed:

• Good data, wrong conclusions below.
• Facebook delivers as much junk as email. The problem is that email is broken, with good mail going into spam, and bad mail slipping through.
• Social networks multiply as younger groups have pulled older groups into the fold. They are closer than friends - families.
• Facebook eliminates the need to maintain email addresses. Just connect.
• Sharing on walls and feeds is something for everyone to learn more about. Same with open Twitter feeds. Pundits who claim to understand - do they really?

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 9, 2009 9:51 AM 

Nielsen Online, an analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites, has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email. While not shocking, the finding does mark an important point in the history of the web.

Youth watchers have long argued that for young people, email is how you communicate with elders in formal situations, while social networks and SMS are the preferred method of communication among peers. Nielsen found, however, that Facebook in particular saw greater growth among older people than it did among the young.

This shift has primarily been driven by Facebook whose greatest growth has come from people aged 35-49 years of age (+24.1 million). From December 2007 through December 2008, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million)

Our take away from these findings? People prefer the clean, controlled, multi-media and publicly social experience of social networking communication over the relatively open, individualistic and spammy medium of email. The fact that there is effectively no data portability allowing communication archives to be ported from one social network to another as there is with email doesn't appear to be bothering people in the short term. We wonder if it will in the long term.

For a more in depth look at this phenomenon, check out danah boyd's latest analysis titled "Social Media is Here to Stay - Now What?."