Robert Chien's Blog

A quick rundown:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick from readwriteweb.com wrote "it took Facebook to introduce people to RSS in a way that was really compelling." and "The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email."

• "The Death of E-Mail" on Slate said "Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail..." and "Instant-messaging, mobile text-messaging, blogging, micro-blogging, and social-networking profiles all help compensate for e-mail's shortcomings." and "It's not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you'll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post—or sending all of them at once—and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived."
• Nick O'Neill wrote on "Email Becomes Center of Social Networks?" "I’m not quite sure how I feel about using my email for the center of my social network but maybe my feelings will change once it launches."
• "Inbox 2.0 isn’t coming, it is here." on Xobni blog said "We realized after building Xobni analytics and playing with email data for 6 months that the most interesting data in email revolved around relationships."
• Mathew Ingram wrote skeptically on Can getting social make email better? "for me, email is pretty close to broken."
• Don Dodge wrote "Email contacts - the natural social network" and said "Email is where [people] naturally communicate and collaborate. Social networks are another isolated island of information."
• Steven Hodson wrote "For me using email as my social network hub doesn’t depend on integration with outside environments or the need to be widgetized in some fashion or other. Instead my Inbox needs tools like Xobni and some serious attention to dealing with spam." and "We already have been using the original social network for a very long time - it just needs some fixing up and new tools to make it better."

• Google announced the new Google Apps Email Migration API for customers whose existing mail systems don't support IMAP.
• Sachin Balagopalan thinks it’s time to phase out email from the work place. "The profound difference [...] is that social networks enable you to participate in a virtual team or community and IMO that is conducive to the business environment - we all belong to a team at work and we interact with our team members. Email on the other hand was not designed with the community in mind rather it’s based on an “account” and you can send and receive emails from any account."

I shared my Messaging 2.0 idea with Han today and she seems to like it. I'm hoping to find some time during Thanksgiving holiday to refine and formalize the architecture.

One of the clever things that Facebook does is how it gives users an option to initialize their social graphs from their address book data on Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail to see which of their friends are already on Facebook. I didn't bite, in fear of giving my credentials to Facebook (even though they promise to discard them after data is pulled), but a thought struck: isn't social graph basically a more fashionable way of saying address book 2.0?

Then yesterday I read this blog on NYTimes that Yahoo! is working to turn existing user profiles and address books into a social network and they're calling it INBOX 2.0. Google is allegedly doing something similar. Makes sense.

I have been thinking for years that address book should be consulted during spam detection to minimize false positives, and the only systems which have your address book in their possession and also handle your Email are webmail providers. Extending it to create social graphs seems like the logical next step.

According to Hitwise, UK internet users visited Facebook, Bebo and MySpace more times last month than they visited Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and other webmail services:

This confirms that social networks are starting to eat into the web-based email providers’ dominance of the internet messaging market.

Does it? While traffic to social networking sites grows steadily, visits to webmail sites as shown above do not decline correspondingly for most part of the chart. Also, the graph only counts hits, not time spent on the sites or number of messages generated (not to mention non-webmail Email traffic).

Until the walls come down between social networks, I can't see myself giving up Email as the primary method of staying in touch with friends and family.

Source: Hitwise - Social networks overtake webmail