Shenanigans: FB Chief Operating Officer Says Email will Die
Now here is a big claim. At the Nielsen 360 Consumer Conference, Sheryl Sandberg is saying that Email will eventually go away, despite the fact that even she finds it hard to imagine a future without it.
The silly thing here is that prior to this statement, Sheryl also declares that it is the current web usage patterns of teens today that determines the trends of the future. It sounds logical, but it also completely ignores what teenagers are actually doing. Her example covers the concept that teenagers would not send emails to each other; they would message each other privately using Facebook’s message features.
The only reason this happens is that accessing the ‘send a message’ button is far easier than logging into a web server. But if all email did was send personal messages among people in a one’s friends’ list, then the technology would have been phased out by now.
Emails do more than help people communicate. Email also works as a personal identification tool on the web –Facebook is trying to do the same, but the need for privacy alone is enough to stop the effort.
And the reason why people trust email accounts to identify them and not their Facebook accounts is due to the fact that emails, as personal as they are, are also anonymous. Of course, barring the use of one’s own name as an email address, anonymity is a key factor that Facebook cannot provide.
Despite the fact that the highest amount of traffic that mobile internet sees is with social networking site Facebook, search engine Google and microblogging Twitter, accessing emails is also an important part of the day for many people. Access to emails is one of the main reasons why smart phones were developed. And while social networking may be pushing the distribution of smart phone technology, it would never be able to replace or phase out emails.
Tags: email, Facebook, Google, Internet, social-networking, Twitter
