A big part of today’s personal email use has to do with consumers engaging with business.  From email newsletters through to things like your bank notifying you of daily transactions on your credit card, many people use email as a way to receive communications from the businesses they use.

As people shift towards using social networks for communicating with friends and family, it is likely that people’s Internet time will shift away from their email program.  This will gradually reduce the convenience aspect of having email messages sent to customers as customers spend more time on social networks.  This means that businesses might have to consider becoming part of social networks!

So how would this work?  Well, the first thing you’ll see is businesses creating profiles on social networks.  For example, a major bank like Citibank could have a profile like "Citibank Personal Banking" used to communicate with its personal banking customers.  If you are a Citibank customer, you could add this profile to your contact list on your social network.  As part of this addition, you can grant permission for "Citibank Personal Banking" to send you private messages.  Lastly, you log-in to your web banking account, and change your "notify me daily of activity on my credit card" to your nominated social network instead of your email address.  From then on, you get your Citibank messages conveniently on your social network instead of your email adddress.

Now some of you might think this is very far-fetched, but it didn’t take long for this capability to exist for email.  And it probably will not take long for social networks to accomodate profiles representing business entities, and provide additional applications to support communication between businesses and their customers.  Most of the technology for this to occur is already in place — the challenge is changing the behaviour of businesses and consumers, and getting them to accept this new form of communication.

It’s hard to predict when all this will happen, but it will be interesting to watch what evolves:

• Social networks will need to maintain tight control over businesses creating profiles to prevent false identities being created, such as what exists in email (e.g. the "phishing" email trend where criminals send fake emails claiming to be your bank, asking you for your personal details).  Social networks will also need to manage naming rights to prevent what happens with domain names, such as people buying a name and attempting to sell it to a higher bidder (e.g. a business could call itself "Citibank Cafe" and get the name "Citibank", knowing it could sell the name to the bank "Citibank" at a premium).
• There are several commercial models social networks might adopt for allowing businesses to partake in social networks.  You could see social networks charging fees to businesses for having profiles, and maybe even per-message fees (like what’s charged for sending text messages on mobile phones).  The "trusted" network provided by social networks could attract premium fees for businesses wanting to communicate with its customers on social networks.
• Social networks might take on large online directory businesses like Yellow and White pages.  We could see social networks offering businesses to be included in a searchable directory.  This directory could be highly controlled by social networks (e.g. to prevent fraud from fake profiles), and made searchable to users on the social network, allowing users to add businesses to their social network in numerous ways, such as our earlier example of receiving messages from Citibank, or maintaining a list of your favourite restaurants, etc.  Perhaps one day on Facebook you’ll be able to create an event like "My birthday dinner", schedule it at your favourite restaurant (from your list), invite your friends from your network, and then share pictures after the event.
• Will social networks be self-regulated or will countries be allowed to enforce their own laws and be able to police social networks.
• Will their be a market for the buying and selling of individual social networks?   For example, can one business buy another business’ social network?

How much information your able to access in your social network depends on a few things, including:

• How deep your network is.  This is affected by how many people are in your list and how big each person’s list is.
• How much information people actually provide.  Many people are still apprehensive about giving up information, and might only allow it to be revealed to people on there list and not to any one else.
• The commercial model of the social networking service.  Some social networks like Facebook are making information more widely available, using advertising to make their money.  Whereas LinkedIn charges fees for certain types of access rights or use of information within the network.

How are Social Networks used?

The main use for social networks is communication.  You use your social network to inform your network about yourself.  The information you share includes employment history (e.g. LinkedIn), interests/hobbies (e.g. MySpace), photos (e.g. Facebook), etc.  It can be batched information, such as uploading a photo album of your recent vacation to Europe.  Or it can be near real-time information, like a status update on Facebook saying "I’m on holiday in Europe".

The type of information and when you make it available depends on how your using your network.  For example, most people use LinkedIn for business-related information and uses, such as finding jobs, clients, etc.  whereas networks like Facebook or MySpace are used for personal information like hobbies, interests, photo albums, etc.  When information is made available is usually after you create it, however many networks are starting to offer features like event calendars which automatically change your status update based on scheduled future events  (e.g. "John is attending Mary’s birthday party"). 

What is email?

Funny to actually try to explain this, as most people know what email is…  But it’s important to really step back for a moment and look and fundamentally how email works and why social networks might superseed email.

Email is fundamentally modeled on traditional mail.  You create a letter, address it to some people, and send it.   Over time, people reply to you letter.   The big difference between email and traditional mail is the speed.  The speed with which emails are sent and received allows for a near real-time dialogue to occur on whatever topic the letter covers, no matter where your recipients are in the world.  So in mainstream business practices, email is often used in place of phone calls and face-to-face meetings.

What are the problems with email?

There are several problems with email-based communication systems.

Emails tend to be threaded discussions, where the initial email gets replied to by one or several people. with each reply added to the original email (called a "thread").  The threaded discussion is continually appended to the original email, and can be quite long depending on the number of people addressed in the email.  The result is information within emails get burried, so the value of the information contained in the email can be hard to extract.

Another problem is the multiplying effect  for emails as the thread continues…  There’s no "master" copy of the email.  Instead, copies are easily forwarded, and most people will end up keeping their own copies of emails within their individual email programs.  This leads to wated resources, where everyone stores copies of different points in the threaded discussions.

Lastly, and perhaps the biggest problem with email, is that its fundamentally a distribution medium and not ideal for rich media.   Many popular email programs have attempted to implement more robust functionality for creating emails with rich content, but most people use email more as a text-only form of communication.  Instead, other applications capable of generating rich content are used, with email used more for sharing links to this content.  For example, rather than embeding a video into an email, people upload the video to YouTube and then share the YouTube web link.

Email use in the corporate world

In several instances, email is a clumsy communication tool.  Today, especially in the business world, other tools are replacing email for specific tasks.  For example, instead of using email to schedule a meeting or event, people are able to maintain calendars and share availability time, with email only used for confirmation and acceptance of meeting invitations.  Documents being created in team environments utilise collaboration systems which allow for workflow processes.  Emails are used mainly to inform team members about steps in the workflow process.  Emails are not used for the actual content creation.

The place for email in the corporate world has changed significantly in the past 10-years.  New systems are replacing email, and as such the use of email is dropping considerably.  Social networks do not appear to have a huge impact on email in the corporate world, but it’s a different story for personal email.

Social networks vs. Personal Email

Email is a one-to-one or one-to-many communication method.  Social networks does the same.  But with Social networks, you create content and "share" it with your network.  Sharing is done by publishing the information to your profile.  The result is like having a mini-website about yourself, where only people in your social network can access and share your information.  Everyone’s mini-websites inter-connect with each-other, and the result is an active social network.  Information is easy to create and share, and there are none of the multiplying effects you have with email.

Just as people check their email inbox on a regular basis, people check their social networking "dashboard" to see recent actions within their social network.  These actions vary depending on the type of network.  For example, business networks like LinkedIn show people changing jobs, linking to other people, and sharing news and insights on industry trends.  Personal networks like Facebook have people sharing life experiences, favourite foods, restaurants, political and religious beliefs, you name it!  The result is social networks is a medium through which to communicate to the people you know.  What you communicate is extensive.  From simple text updates about what you’re doing this moment, blogs on your favourite TV show, to videos of your family reuninion.  The content people create are rich and full of multi-media.  Social networks replaces email as the distribution medium for sharing content.

The result will be a decline in email use as people shift to using social networks as their preferred medium for communicating.  Social networks like facebook are beginning to add more robust address book capabilities, such as storing contact information.  Soon things like synchronising contacts in your social network with portable devices like mobile phones and laptops will mean you can rely on your social network tool as a personal information manager, and therefor rely less on your email program.

So what happens to "me@somewhere.com"???

All the features of your email program will be made available on your social network.  The result will mean less use of email as a communication tool.  With that, the whole addressing scheme of "me@somewhere.com" will become unnessary except for getting people into a social network system (like Facebook) or for communicating between different social networking systems. For example, if Facebook becomes the defacto standard for social networks with most internet users on it, then the "@somewhere.com" used by email won’t be needed in the Facebook world, because "@somewhere.com" is Facebook! 

It is likely that each independent social network will adopt the wall-garden approach which has frequently surfaced in the history of the Internet, such as America Online’s separate network in the early 90′s, through to various chat software programs not working with each other (gone are the days where you had to have Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo and ICQ all running at the same time).  Over the long term, who knows which social network will win.  But a casualty is likely to be email, for personal use as it’s left behind in favour of communication using social networks.