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Gen-next dumps email in favor of chat and text
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 22 December 2010, 20:16 IST
San Francisco: It looks like the generation next likes everything fast and quick. And this has impacted the good old media of communication like phone calls and emails. The young people's preferred way for reaching out is via online chats and text messages, reports Matt Richtel of The New York Times.
So what is the issue with emails? Reason the 'chat and text' people that emailing involves too many steps including signing in, giving a subject line, and sending the message. Plus it could take hours before you receive a response from the other end.
And this trend is forcing companies to change their product strategies. Case in point would be Facebook's message services introduced recently, which focus on instant gratification.
Facebook ditched the subject line on its messages as research showed that most people either left it blank or wrote just a 'hi' that did not give any information about the content of the message. The 'cc' and 'bcc' lines of emails were also done away in Facebook messages.
Andrew Bosworth, Director of Engineering, Facebook said, "The future of messaging is more real time, more conversational and more casual. The medium isn't the message. The message is the message."
And there are statistics to support the growing trend. The unique visitors' number is on a decline in U.S. to email sites like Yahoo and Hotmail, as per comScore. The last sore in such visits was in November 2009, which since then have gone down by six percent. Visits by people in age group 12-17 fell around 18 percent. However, an exception to this trend is Gmail that witnessed 10 percent growth in visits from last year.