Facebook COO Says The End of Email is Near
Is social networking taking the place of email?
Tuesday during the Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg indicated that email may soon be a thing of the past.
Why? Because our future rests on the shoulder of today's teens, and apparently only 11-percent of them email on a daily basis. The other 89-percent of the nation's teens are communicating via SMS, Twitter, or other social networking solutions (cough Facebook cough).
"E-mail--I can't imagine life without it--is probably going away," she told the audience.
But that assumption just doesn't make sense. Teens like to throw eggs at cars, have slumber parties, sneak out the bedroom window at night, and film zombie movies at the local park using chicken blood. They're less likely to send an email than making a quick status update or share their 3-day sunburn with a list of 256 friends.
What teens do now doesn't actually define what they'll do later when they're adults.
The San Francisco Chronicle also called her bluff and raised her twenty, referring back to the Pew Internet research she supposedly referenced in her presentation.
The data collected by the firm stated that 11-percent of those teens used email to communicate with friends on a daily basis. It also indicated that 68-percent of teens use email "at least occasionally." Apparently teens also consider email as a tool for communicating with adults and institutions. They have more socializing to do rather than business, so naturally the email percentage would be lower.
Pew Internet's data also suggested that teens never emailed to any great extent in the first place. Pew Internet began its study on teens in 2006, and it was a meager 14-percent back then. With that said, the current 11-percent who actually admit to using email isn't really all that surprising.
So despite all this, is email on the way out? There's no question that it will be killed off one day, just not within the timeframe Sandberg seemed to insinuate. It's not hard to imagine that the COO of Facebook would want email to grow extinct, and for every web surfer to use Facebook as their main tool of communication.
Just think of the revenue all those page views would generate.
- The Most Sophisticated Barbie Ever, Uncovered
- San Francisco Passes Cellphone Radiation Law
- Wiretape: Ultra-Thin Solution For Cable Clutter?
- Gran Turismo 5 Collector's Edition Will Be $99.99
- Call of Duty: Black Ops - Gameplay Demonstration
- Unlocked iPhone 4 for Canadians and Britons
- Droid X is Verizon's Answer to Sprint's EVO 4G
- Yes, Please: Xbox 360 Arcade for $99* at Walmart
- AT&T/iPad Hacker Arrested on Drug Charges
- Nintendo, Sega Talk Future Console Hardware
- New Xbox 360 Gutted, Modded; Eats Alan Wake
- Experts: Losses Due to Piracy Are Exaggerated
- The Fuel Cell Power Pack That Fits in Your Hand
- Darth Watch Makes the Sith Proud
- EA: 3D May Come with Premium Pricetag
- The Handspring Visor, Resurrected
- Droid Incredible Secretly Tracks Surfing Habits?
- AT&T Halts iPhone 4 Orders as eBay Prices Hit $5K
- YouTube Intros Cloud-based Video Editing
Yea, shes totally right, its not like big name businesses still use it... oh wait they do.
Just like 'snailmail' was going to die out - funny, I still get stuff in the mail (other than junkmail). I love these predictions fueled by self-interest.
so untrue.
This COO must have missed her corporate emails.
No one in companies tweete or facebook or text.
Your friends might not email you but recruiters and business
or internet companies do email you .
Yes, when this little teen girl wants to tell that little teen girl that she just painted her toe nails she will text it (vise email it), but the world is much bigger than that. We still need email for the grown up stuff. Email provides a lot more services and is NEEDED in business. I work for the military and I could see it now, “yeah, I’ll text you that later sir.” Or maybe, “I posted it on my facebook that I was not coming it to work today sir.”
What about the business world? I doubt they will entrust sensitive info to a social networking group.
I know I wouldn't!
To say something as dumb as this, she is not qualify to be anywhere near a COO. So when we are looking for job now, we have to twit our resume. In a working office, we are going to facebook friend our client or what? So base on her assumption of teenagers being productive adults, the email will be obsolete? To respond to her dumb comment, I am going to say a dumb comment too: She must had dated one of the programmers or founders to get this job.
To say something as dumb as this, she is not qualify to be anywhere near a COO. So when we are looking for job now, we have to twit our resume. In a working office, we are going to facebook friend our client or what? So base on her assumption of teenagers being productive adults, the email will be obsolete? To respond to her dumb comment, I am going to say a dumb comment too: She must had dated one of the programmers or founders to get this job.
Agreed
ghazgull, we don't.
"With all the security problems, the end of Facebook is near." jsc
Just as credible.
"Facebook-I can imagine life without it- is probably going away"
Maybe the COO is a dumbf#ck, too.
she doesn't know what she is talking about.
she obviously needs a good seeing to
how about "The End of FACEBOOK is Near" !!!!!
No more emails?? But then where would I get news about penis enlargement pills?
THIS JUST IN: The End of Spoken Words is Near.
Babies are our future, and only 11% of babies use full spoken words daily at the age of 1. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had this quote:
"Spoken words--I can't imagine life without them--are probably going away,"
There you have it folks. Full words out, garbledegook in.
adungadungadunga
I need to mail this article to someone.. ;-)
Yeah right - and when Facebook starts making people pay to use it, the end of Facebook will be near.
It's people like her that make the term "expert" synonymous with "moron".
Duh. In the schools I work in, social networking sites are blocked, and kids are encouraged to use email.
Personally I don't have a facebook page, or a twitter account. I use email for business, and personally. Can't see email going away for a looooong time yet. But when it does, it won't be to something like twitter or facebook. Can you imagine allowing business associates to see the pictures of the last stag night you went on ? I'd be in big trouble if that happened.
Company for demented run by demented. What a surprise!
When the "big shots" announce statements like this they are most probably just plainly wrong! Shows how little they understand the world around them. Then again self-interest probably makes them utter statements like these.
She's just imagining a day when we all run our lives on Facebook. Sorry you dumb bitch but I won't be following you into a world run by Facebook.
Furthermore, even as a teen, I always considered email very much the official way of communicating online. I never use it to keep in touch with friends. I have GTalk, MSN, Skype, AIM, texting and phone calls for that (no Facebook chat for me, no Facebook messaging).
Even now, in my early 20s, I still consider email a way to subscribe to websites, to get my account, to define my identity, and to be a common way to log in to most modern websites (Beats OpenID/FB Connect to me)
I'll continue using email for a way to interact with more official people/bodies than myself. I'd never use it to communicate with someone on in my social arena though.
Where I work, we've transferred almost completely to twitter-based communication. Publicly sharing every internal communication is the way forward.
This just in, taxes and death may also be a thing of the past...
Of course she says the end of e-mail is near, one of the features of her company's product is a non-e-mail communication system. What do you think she is going to say, "E-mail is what people who do Real Business use, Facebook messaging is for kids?" No, she wants to try to get more people to rely on her product and draw in more customers.
Her saying that e-mail is dead is like DirecTV saying terrestrial TV is dead or Microsoft saying Linux is dead. She's hoping for the "if we repeat it enough, people will believe it and it will come true" outcome, but in reality, e-mail is going nowhere as it fulfills a specific need of communication. We still have terrestrial radio despite decades of TV execs saying radio is dead and people still have landline phones despite pundits declaring them dead. After hearing decades of "X is dead," I've come to realize that the people that make those statements are almost invariably idiots.
Wishful thinking on the part of FB
if someone texts, sms, etc. me a helpdesk ticket, i'm hitting the delete button.
Email will disappear. Of course:
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home," Ken Olsen, founder of mainframe-producer Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
"No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer—640K ought to be enough for anybody," Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981.
I just love future technology predictions don't you
This, is coming from anyone in Facebook? Ok let's all believe it. Lol, what an idiot. Oh yea, paper is going to die. Email is going to die. Calculator is going to die. Landline phone is going to die. Right.
Big Wig at FaceBook says you don't need e-mail, just FaceBook. Glad these people are here to tell me these things...whew!
Because everyone will message each other on Facebook? Oh wait...my corporation blocked it.
Most white-collar jobs use email, it's not going anywhere. Only teens will stop using email for most things.
Email isn't going anywhere. For important stuff, email is still the way to go. I don't know anybody that posts important stuff on facebook in a business setting...