Author: Jeremy Kandah Here is the article that referenced work I did in the wsj. This is the quote that references me: “In the coming months, AOL email users will be able to access their Facebook accounts or other Web sites through a special side panel created within AOL’s Web mail service. AOL is also working to let its users personalize their accounts and connect with other users.”
Will Social Features
Make Email Sexy Again?
By KEVIN J. DELANEY and VAUHINI VARA
October 18, 2007; Page B1
Email providers are trying to steal some of social networking’s thunder as fast-growing services like Facebook Inc. begin to encroach on their turf.
The biggest Web email services — including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit — are adding features that allow users to perform such sociable functions as tracking friends and creating personal-profile pages for others to see. At the same time, social networks like Facebook and News Corp.’s MySpace have upgraded their messaging services, enabling individuals to send emails to the outside world from their accounts, transmit video greetings to friends and make voice calls from their computers.
The developments could heighten competition between email providers and social networks for the loyalty of users — and the advertising revenue generated by usage. The latest moves also signal a wave of changes in features for email, which is the most widely used Web application.
The prize is the loyalty of people like Anil Divvela, a 24-year-old student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. Mr. Divvela grew up with email but now spends less time on it, using Facebook as an email replacement. He especially likes one Facebook feature: When he pastes a link to an interesting article in a Facebook message, Facebook automatically fetches the article’s headline and any photos that ran with it and attaches them to the message. When he sends a link to an online video, the recipient can watch the video within the message without having to click the link. “My friends use Facebook as an email service,” says Mr. Divvela.
Such changing habits could have implications for the Internet portals, which rely on email for much of their traffic and to bring in consumers who will use their other Web services. And usage drives revenue because Internet companies generally base the pricing of advertising appearing alongside email and social-networking services on the amount of traffic the Internet companies get.
The Internet portals have failed to achieve breakout success with their homegrown social networks — which let individuals create profile pages, communicate with friends and share photos and other digital content — at a time when consumers’ social-networking use is booming. Yahoo, for one, released a social-networking and blogging service in early 2005 dubbed Yahoo 360 that fell short of expectations. Now the email providers are betting that they’ll have more success by adding social-networking features to their email services, which millions of people are already using.
In August, there were 542.9 million users of email that is accessed primarily via Web browsers. That compared with 483.7 million social-networking users world-wide, according to comScore Inc. Including non-Web-based email such as accounts that businesses provide to their workers, there will be 1.4 billion email accounts in active use world-wide at the end of this year, estimates Radicati Group Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif., research firm.
Yahoo executives describe the company’s 250 million email users globally as the “world’s largest dormant social network.” In recent years, the Sunnyvale, Calif., concern has added some features that allow individuals to see when friends who are also Yahoo users are online and to send instant messages to them without clicking over to Yahoo’s instant-messaging software.
In a mock-up of additional social-networking features it is considering, Yahoo imagines users creating profile pages with such data as their birthdays. On their email welcome screens, individuals might be greeted by lists of friends celebrating birthdays and friends who have sent them emails. Yahoo is considering offering users incentives to identify their friends, such as the ability to email larger files to people in their social networks.
One experimental Yahoo service known internally as “Friend Finder” analyzes a user’s email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a user has strong email connections. It bases its findings on the volume of incoming and outgoing traffic and such factors as the frequency and speed with which the two parties respond to each other. The service works with emails sent by non-Yahoo users as well.
“I have very little doubt that email will be sexy again in a way that people will say, ‘Holy Smokes, I didn’t see this coming,’” says Yahoo Senior Vice President Brad Garlinghouse. He cites research from July indicating that only 20% of Yahoo email users are MySpace users and just 10% are on Facebook.
While many of the new social email features work only when a user’s friends use the same email provider, Mr. Garlinghouse says the features could eventually extend across email services. Email providers would first have to agree to share some user information, such as personal profile data, and work out technical standards for doing so.
Rob Cassedy, 30, has used Yahoo as his primary personal email account for years, sending and receiving about 50 emails a day. Recently the eBay Inc. employee signed up with social-networking services including Facebook and Hi5 Networks Inc., in part to better track what his friends are up to. But Mr. Cassedy says he’d likely prefer using social-networking features in his Yahoo email account. “I’m much more likely to use the things that are incremental to what I already use rather than start using a new service,” he says.
Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., has added social-networking features in recent years that work with its Windows Live Hotmail email and instant-messaging services. They allow its 300 million email users world-wide to create individual profile pages with contact details and other personal information they can choose to display to their friends. Microsoft says there is no evidence social-networking services are crimping email usage, noting that its user numbers increased from 285 million in July.
In the coming months, AOL email users will be able to access their Facebook accounts or other Web sites through a special side panel created within AOL’s Web mail service. AOL is also working to let its users personalize their accounts and connect with other users. For instance, when users hover their mouse over one of their buddies in an AIM instant messaging section of AOL email, data about the member will pop up. AOL is also making its email service accessible through social-networking sites and other Web pages so that users can preview and check messages without visiting AOL.com or its other email sites directly.
And Google Inc., which operates the Gmail email service and Orkut social network, is working on ways to tap into the social-networking wave, including through Gmail, say people familiar with the matter. One Google effort could involve analyzing the strength of Gmail users’ connections with one another by tracking the frequency of their email and chat correspondence, these people say.
Google wants to provide outside Web developers with information about Google users’ personal connections so that the developers can build Web-based services — available via Google’s personalized home page and possibly elsewhere — that will make it easier for people to track their friends, these people say. Hypothetically, that could allow a Google user to see on her personalized home page a list of all the videos her friends have recently uploaded to YouTube or the public messages they have posted on Orkut. Eventually such features could be integrated into Gmail, too, these people say. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
Some social-networking executives say what draws people to their services involves more than just email and messaging services with user profiles bolted onto them. Facebook believes using the connections between people as a backbone for other services, like photo sharing and event planning, is key, says Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up who previously ran AOL’s instant-messaging business. Facebook users can indicate which of their friends are pictured in a photo they have posted, and Facebook automatically notifies those friends about the photo, for example. Users can also keep track of their friends’ social calendars, alongside their own.
In August Facebook began allowing its users to send messages from their Facebook accounts to regular email addresses by typing the email address into the box where they normally type the name of a fellow Facebook user. Meanwhile, starting next month, MySpace users will be able to make Internet voice calls by clicking a button in the MySpace instant-messaging feature through a partnership with eBay Inc.’s Skype. A MySpace spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.
Back to school! Back to school, to prove to Dad that I’m not a fool!