gen y shuns e-mail, becomes e-social

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Publication: The Economic Times Mumbai; Date:2011 Jan 13; Section:Technology; PageNumber: 4

Gen Y shuns e-mail, becomes e-social

More Young Ones Use More Of FB & Twitter And Don’t Think Much Of MailsSrividya Iyer & Pankaj Mishra BANGALORE

FOR Sanyukta Sharma, 16, a high-school student in Delhi, speed matters a lot. Every timeshe receives a text message or tweet from a friend or a classmate, she scrambles to write

back almost in a flash. “I have no time to get into an email box, compose mail, key in thesubject and then press the send button. I just say it realtime on Facebook or tweet about

it,” she says.

Sanyukta, along with many others in the 15-21 age bracket, form a small but fast-growingtribe of Net users who are shifting away from traditional email solutions. Research firms like

Gartner and Comscore expect almost 20% of new users to shift to social networking

platforms from email networks over the next three years.It’s not that people have stopped using the Internet as a communications means enitrely

— but the shift is towards instant messaging and real-time Twitter and Facebook updates.

“Email won’t die. Its format and mechanism will change because the volumes will increase,”said Akhilesh Tuteja, executive director, KPMG.

The email providers may have big plans for the future but that does not change the

present scenario that social networking sites are more popular than email services.According to Experian, an information services company, on January 1, 2011, visits to social

networking sites and forums was an impresive 12.97% in India while that of email serviceswas 8.11%.

For companies like Facebook, first-time, young Internet users offer a lucrative opportunity

— to woo them away from traditional email providers. By getting into the email business,Facebook is looking at grabbing market share from Gmail, Yahoo, Lycos and Hotmail.

“Emails are like fax machines today, at least in terms of positioning. At work, I am forced

to use emails for communication. But in my life, email is dead,” says Pranjal Purwar, a 26-year-old banking professional in Mumbai.

The stakes are too high for both the old-world email providers and the new-ageaggressive Internet firms to ignore. There are about 1.4 billion email users globally, growing

at the rate of over 100 million a year. In contrast, there are already 500 million people on

Facebook. Experts feel if Facebook can attract even 20% of the 900 million email users who

are not on Facebook onto its platform, it can make a dent into Google’s, Yahoo’s andMicrosoft’s email user numbers. In India, GMail is No.1 followed by Yahoo, Rediff and

Windows Live Mail.

BUSINESS USERS’ SHIFT

For businesses too, employing the millennial workforce means shift from traditional way ofcommunication. Already, young employees such as Purwar are forcing them to change.

Gartner says 20% of users will use social networking sites instead of email for theirbusiness communications too by 2014. “Very soon, you won’t be able to see email and social

networking separate. Email will not die, it will in fact have more flavour and will be more

integrated,” said Neha Gupta, senior research analyst, Gartner.

EMAIL FLUX

On their part, email providers have been revamping their products to compete more

effectively with the social networking onslaught. The focus is now on doing away with

features that do not matter.

“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode,” said Monica Basso,research vice-president at Gartner. “E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as

contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” Bassoadded.

According to Komli Media, GMail had the highest unique users — at 28.7 million — in India

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on September 2010 followed by Yahoomail (23.2 million), Rediffmail (7.7 million) and

HotMail at 6.24 million. This implies that in India, only 2.5 million GMail users are not there

on Facebook — not a large number.Experts believe that the changes social media is bringing about in the way people

communicate through the internet will change the nature of email. “Social networking ischanging the behavioural pattern of consumers. This push will only grow further and

integrate with email,” said Gupta.

Lack of applications is what makes email less appealing for the users. “I think that email’shandicaps are the lack of organised group conversation and the absence of applications,”

said Joseph James, who is a media professional.

However, not all young users are flying to social media websites. Adarsh Sinha, a BComstudent in Bangalore, is one of them. “That Facebook and Twitter are cooler is just a

misnomer. Social media communication is a pain for those who appreciate good language,”says Sinha who always wanted to study literature. For such users, email providers are

already changing

Email is likely to have all that the users want and more. According to Tuteja, applications

that will make email productive will emerge. There will be analytics built in which willunderstand the usage pattern of a user. For one, the system will analyse how soon a person

responds to a particular mail and makes it a priority accordingly. It will also analyse the timespent by a user on a project or an assignment and mark all mails related to the topic as

important.

But for Sanyukta and her many friends, email is dead. “No offence to emails, but they willhave to take another birth and remove the ‘mail’ suffix. It does not sound cool any more,”

says Tanya Singh, a high school student in Delhi, and part of Sanyukta’s social circle.


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gen y shuns e-mail, becomes e-social

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