According to this video presentation by Jesse Thomas, eighty-one percent of email is spam. But if you view the rest of the statistics, you can see how email is becoming rapidly irrelevant as a key communications – and publishing – tool.
JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo. Hat tip: @adders
I don’t see the logic behind the headline?
The spam % doesn’t really matter so long as spam filters catch most of it, that way the user gets the relevant stuff and ignores the trash.
As for the irrelevancy argument, social networks don’t kill e-mail and even if, for the sake of argument, it reduces the amount of e-mail it will never eliminate it. On top of which, Facebook looks set to launch it’s own e-mail service.
Finally, most people working in an office/work environment know exactly how useful email is on a daily basis. That isn’t changed by social networks.
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Totally agree with Eoin. Besides Twitter and Facebook are also awash in spam. Who hasn’t got a spam Twitter follower? The problem is in confusing two very different forms of communication. It’s a gross simplification but think of email as private and one-to-one, and social networking as public and many-to-many. Saying email is doomed because of social networking is like saying that the phone is doomed because of the advent of television. It just doesn’t make much sense.
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In the developed world, maybe.
However, even with first world net access, Facebook remains a hit-or-miss posting proposition. How many server not found errors have other users experienced.
Email including email-2-web publishing remains a vital tool for the developing world, where net access remains patchy, and expensive.
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