Email is not the social network - A Rebuttal
Several weeks ago I posted a neat quote from a NYTimes article about Yahoo and Google trying to parlay their email assets into social networks. Michael Arrington responded to that article complaining that these companies were indeed failing to capture the “vibrant social networking that already goes on daily via my email inbox”. And lately Jeff Nolan has taken up the theme in his 2008 Predictions saying: “Email is the most powerful social network in existence.” This is but a small sample of this tech meme, which extends to the recent kerfuffle over Gmail’s “auto-friending” inadvertently exposing Google Reader shared feeds, and to the recent fundings of companies like Xobni.
For a while I was sort of buying this story, indeed even incorporating pieces of it into the mergelab pitch, but as I read Jeff’s latest post today linking to the article Email And Cellphone Contacts Are The Real Social Graph by Scott Karp, I started to get itchy about it. That article hints at one reason for my itchiness: the phrase “people over 30” appears twice in the first two paragraphs. The quote from the top also applies: email just doesn’t feel like a nightclub.
For a lot of people, especially young people, email is just not going to be a hub of personal communications. I think email is going to become what is used to write thank-you notes to grandparents, to exchange PDFs with your lawyer, to interact with businesses and to write memos at the office - in short, a replacement for many things traditionally done with postal mail and paper until fairly recently. For more personal communications, other methods will predominate - something out of that constantly evolving soup of IM, Myspace Mail, etc.
Even as someone in the “people over 30” category, this statement from Scott Karp does not ring true: “Most people over 30 don’t have many (or any) business or personal relationships that don’t involve communicating by email.” In fact, it’s not even close to true - a quick scan of my IM contacts, social networks, etc. reveals a stack of people whose email addresses have never traversed my Gmail account.
As I look deeper, there’s not a lot of “vibrant social networking” going on in my email inbox. There’s a ton of business networking going on there, but I count that as different from social networking. If there’s a hub of my social network, it’s a messy mix of cellphone/SMS and my IM contacts. For people a few years younger than me, it’s Facebook or Myspace. (Overheard on the bus recently: a couple of late teens, one saying to the other “just Myspace me that info, ok?”)
If you’re still with me to this point, then it follows that turning email into a social network is a proposition that only makes sense for an over-30 crowd, and therefore you have to believe that the over-30 crowd actually wants social networking-like features in their email. My sample is limited, but the non-techie over-30s that I know really aren’t all that keen on social networking. (Overheard at my house recently: “I don’t need all that Twitter-y stuff.”)
The other possibility is that social network-y type things can be applied via email in the enterprise (ref. Xobni, Brad Feld’s recent yearnings to dig into the corporate Exchange treasure trove). I don’t know if this is a good idea or not; but taking consumer type things (e.g. portals) and turning them into enterprise businesses has a solid bet in the past - at least for getting funding, maybe not always in terms of results.
Also: why all this discussion around email as a social network / social graph source, and relative silence about IM?
My conclusion: the “email as social graph” idea is a production of the (predominantly over-30) tech exec/VC/blogger set; and at best it will have a modest impact on real personal communcations, in a “legacy-connector” sort of way, when it eventually gets deployed in products.
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