Which do you think is the largest social network in the world? Take a guess. The answer from the initiated and number followers would be “Facebook”, which has upwards of 200 million active users. Well, it would surprise you to know that that answer may not entirely be correct. What is today the world’s first and largest social network is – Email !
Jeremiah Owyang, the Forrester analyst of social technologies, has a very interesting take on this.
And to be sure, email does qualify as a social network – it has profiles just as social networks (the signatures in email can serve as profiles), they allow you to connect to people and exchange information which become conversations, and of course allow you to share things and collaborate with other groups.
In terms of numbers, just hotmail and yahoo between them have upwards of 650 million active users. The other means of social communication already has made inroads into email – we get notifications of all kinds regarding activities on social media platforms in our inboxes. So email already is part of the social sphere anyways.
More and more email Vendors are foraying into the social space
by adding “Share this” (called Social Pollination) type of features to direct email marketing pieces so friends can share emails with friends in social networks.
So what does the future of Email and Social Networks look like? J. Owyang thinks that they will probably the same. In the next few years, email and social networks will look the same and he expects email vendors like Google, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Live to envelop the social experience. If you consider Facebook’s news stream or Friendfeed, these are starting to represent simlar content from emails –there is a definite merging happening
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