Categories: Social Media

Facebook slowly replacing traditional email

These days many prefer to send me an email using LinkedIn or Facebook. I am yet to get used to this new platform for email when it comes to user experience they don’t come anywhere near the traditional email. I cannot see FB’s Inbox replacing traditional email, how do you create folders and organize your email in Inbox?

The chart below shows how Social Networks & Online games are taking away the time spent on email. Few term it as “1/3rd of your time is being wasted on Facebook & Farmville (allthingsd.com URL not operational anymore)”

It would be interesting to see a similar analysis for the Indian internet user base. Reasonably sure surfers in India are spending a lot of time on Facebook. Online movies are popular amongst youngsters in India but bandwidth is an issue here. Telcos need to a lot more to provide faster bandwidth in India.

Top 10 Sectors by Share of U.S. Internet Time
RANK Category Share of Time
June 2010
Share of Time
June 2009
% Change in
Share of Time
1 Social Networks 22.7% 15.8% 43%
2 Online Games 10.2% 9.3% 10%
3 E-mail 8.3% 11.5% -28%
4 Portals 4.4% 5.5% -19%
5 Instant Messaging 4.0% 4.7% -15%
6 Videos/Movies 3.9% 3.5% 12%
7 Search 3.5% 3.4% 1%
8 Software Manufacturers 3.3% 3.3% 0%
9 Multi-category Entertainment 2.8% 3.0% -7%
10 Classifieds/Auctions 2.7% 2.7% -2%
Other 34.3% 37.3% -8%
Source: The Nielsen Company

So how much time did you spend on Facebook today? Me? Very very minimal.

Update: Finally what I expected happened, Inbox is pretty much dead on FB.

BG Mahesh

Internet application ideator and implementor. Been there and done that since early 1990s. I like to present data to the common man in the simplest manner on the internet.

View Comments

  • The worst fact is that spam's are little difficult to avoid and nowdays in this automated world most of the posts in the facebook are almost spam!

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