+44 (0)20 7930 4158POPULAR TOOLS
Email could become obsolete, predicts Facebook COO
Email could become obselete as internet users increasingly turn to other forms of communication such as social networking and SMS, according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Speaking at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference, Sandberg pointed to figures showing that teenagers are using email less and less. If that trend continues and spreads out to the wider web, email could become obsolete, she claims.
"If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today," says Sandberg. "And the latest figures say that only 11% of teenagers email daily. So email is probably going away."
Facebook, as the world’s biggest social network, clearly has a vested interest in hastening the demise of email. It is pinning its future on the opportunity around short-form communications as an email alternative. Earlier this month CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook is not developing its own web-based email client despite previous rumours to the contrary.
"People already use Facebook for messaging," he says. "I think the opportunity is more around short-form communications."
Though the evidence from teenagers reveals an interesting trend, it seems unlikely that email will completely disappear, particularly for business purposes. Email is still the second most popular internet activity, accounting for 7.2% of online time in April, according to Nielsen. Its use is also expected to increase, with the number of email accounts globally rising from 2.9bn now to 3.8bn by 2014, according to a report by the Radicati Group. Across the same period, the number of social network accounts is set to increase from 2.1bn to 3.6bn.
