E-mail as Social Network: the Pitfalls
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E-mail is one of the oldest functions of the Internet. Originally used by scientists and scholars to collaborate on projects, its popularity grew – and with the advent of the World Wide Web, practically everybody online now has an email address, and many users have several. Now Google and Yahoo want to change e-mail to make it more like a social network.
To some extent, the nature of e-mail itself has changed over the decades. My very first email account was strictly text-based and could not even handle attachments. The amount of e-mail I could save was limited by the size of my hard drive. Fortunately, that wasn't too big of an issue, since I hardly ever received any spam (and if that doesn't reveal what an old fogy I am, I don't know what will).
Nowadays, any e-mail account worth its salt can handle attachments, HTML, video, audio, images, and who knows what else. We use our e-mail along with web sites to pay bills, shop online, communicate with sellers when we win auctions on eBay...the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, so does the spam and phishing; fortunately, there are filters of various sorts that help to a greater or lesser extent.
E-mail is only one form of digital communication these days, however. Many if not most web surfers also use instant messaging and the now-ubiquitous social networks. In fact, IT Week recently reported that, according to a study commissioned by the developers of Fuser, nearly ninety percent of US Internet users spend at least seven hours a week managing their email, social networking accounts and other digital communications.
It's interesting to break down those figures a little by age. While more than 79 percent of those surveyed had two or more e-mail addresses and belonged to at least one social network, more than 90 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 21 were at least as digitally involved. Here's a particularly painful figure: more than half of those surveyed - 66 percent - spent 10 or more hours a week managing their online communications. So if it feels like you have less time lately to keep up with everything, well, you're probably right. Could Google's and Yahoo's ideas for combining e-mail with social networking help you manage the chaos?
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