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Is social networking replacing email?

Posted in Digital, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs July 3rd, 2007 by Melinda Varley

Every product and service has its sell by date in the ever changing and developing world of technology, but is email the next to become ‘uncool’ and be replaced by our social networking sites?

I’ve lived in a lot of houses in London and every single one has always had interent access for the sole reason of keeping in touch with friends and family from every corner of the globe. But nowadays we are seeing the phenomenon of email being replaced by voice over IP products such as Skype and by social networking sites that allow our friends to see our happy snaps and leave us messages while reading about what we’ve been up to.

Email is a way of life for businesses and will therefore never be entirely replaced, but the need for access to it 24/7 is fading as we turn to Facebook, MySpace and Bebo to do everything from send out party invites to sharing our very own movie reviews.

When the mobile phone first starting to become a necessity all those years ago, calling your friends (and being able to be reached anywhere at anytime to be reminded to pick up the milk) was the be all and end all and we thought it couldn’t get better. However, the luxury was short lived and was replaced by text messages which were cheaper and way cooler.

Text messages you could save and share and gloat about, phone calls were forgotten almost immediately after hanging up. It’s similar with emailing, only you can see your emails and your friends and their photos. Social networking sites allow our friends to also see how popular we are, how good we looked in that photo and how long we stayed at that cool club on Saturday night. Social networking is shouting to a whole list of friends at once while emailing is almost a private conversation which is now reserved for work purposes.

You don’t see any of my house mates fighting over the laptop to check if their mum emailed, they want to know who’s doing what, who, when, where and how. And they can do that without much effort at all.