Last month we looked at why companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook want your email. The post looked at a presentation by Jeff Hardy of SmarterTools, given at HostingCon 2011.
Now the presentation is online and SmarterTools has come up with an infographic to summarize the relative size and value of email versus other communication modes.
The gist is this: while Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus all get tons of interest, email is quietly chugging away as the workhorse of the connected world. Email, even after discounting the volume that’s spam, is used far more than Facebook and Twitter combined. How much more? Daily activity for Facebook is pegged at 60 million upates. Twitter sees about 140 million tweets per day. Email? 188 billion messages. Yeah, billion. Insert obligatory Austin Powers quote here.
Hardy says that companies shouldn’t lose sight of the value of email. That means two things. One, it’s important for companies to realize what value their email has to providers like Google – that extract value from users beyond and above the price of hosting email with them. Two, hosting providers should keep looking at email as a profitable service to provide.
Hardy’s presentation is now up on YouTube in four parts. Check it out, the quality of the video could be better, but it’s an interesting presentation. Part one is embedded below, and we’ve got links to the other three as well.
The staying power of email makes me wonder whether anything ever will displace email. The best efforts of companies like Google (see, for instance, Wave) haven’t done so well. Any takers?
