Social networks received more UK traffic than webmail services for the first time last month, according to Hitwise.
In October, the top 25 social network sites received 5.17% of all UK internet visits, compared to 4.98% for email services like Hotmail, Gmail and others.
The figures show that a growing number of UK web users are now choosing to communicate with friends and contacts through social networks' messaging services rather than email.
In general, younger web users prefer social networks to webmail, while older surfers spend more time on email.
Hitwise's Robin Goad compared visitor data for Facebook and Windows Live Mail and found that Facebook attracted more users from the 18-34 age group.
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Graham Charlton is Senior Reporter at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin.
Posted 08 November 2007 11:45am by Graham Charlton with 2 comments
Tags: Social Media
Topics: Online Surveys & Research, Social Networks & Online Communities
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Graham Charlton
Online Advertising
Managing Director at Emojo Ltd
7:38PM on 8th November 2007
This is a phenomenal development in terms of how quickly user behavior has evolved over the past couple of years. As with many of these trends, the growth is lead by the younger generation, but this will extend to all age groups over the coming years as the utility of Facebook and other social networks becomes apparent.
An interesting development to note is the actual drop in usage for the webmail sites, which is the most significant in a while. This is simply happening because a great deal of this communication is now happening directly on the social networking sites and to a certain extent the webmail clients are becoming less used.
Another development is the increased utilty of services such as Gmail which now, rather than forcing you online to check and send your messages allows you to use IMAP, the Deskbar and lots of other utitities which present your inbox and even index it for searching. This means decreased website usage even though the actual usage may well be increasing.
2:42PM on 15th November 2007
The key advantage of sites like Facebook over webmail is that messages come from authenticated senders. It solves the spam problem because you only get messages from people you know. Of course, it has the problem that you can only accept messages from people you already know and can't even receive transactional emails there. But it's the closest thing we have to a working authenticated sender email communications network today.