Last year while playing for a basketball league with a bunch of my friends, I updated game stats, schedules, among other things with my teammates through Facebook instead of traditional email, not because I didn’t want to but because it was easier and I didn’t have their email addresses. Every one of them had a Facebook account they checked more often than their emails. It wasn’t anything new, I was already following a trend that others had been doing for months on end. Plus, it was easier since most of them checked their Facebook messages more often than their emails. It’s a growing trend among users of social networking sites and it’s a trend that is likely to kill email, says a new Wall Street Journal report.

The Wall Street Journal report claims that the constant need to be connected to everything has made social networking sites easier, faster to use, and more fun than the traditional email. While I do agree that it may be a little more fun to check out a message from a long lost friend, find it easier to read someone’s status to figure out what they’re doing, it’s still a hassle for me to login and check messages, while an email can directly be sent to the user’s smartphone, email client or computer instantly and reply within seconds. It’s just my way of staying connected to friends faster, than having to be constantly connected to Facebook on my iPhone.

The WSJ report does bring up a good point in the convenience and speed factor when it comes to social networking sites:

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

That quote can be somewhat misleading. I don’t know anyone that updates their Facebook status to let the world know about everything they do. They update it every few days, with only some updating it every few hours but the numbers don’t lie, more people are connecting through social networking sites than through email. Here are some figures:

- Email use across many parts of the globe increased 21% from 229.2 million users in August 208 to 276.9 in August 2009.

- Social networking use jumped 31% to 301.5 million users in the same time period.

Does this suggest that the email is about to take a backseat to new forms of communications like Twitter and Facebook? While I’d like to think the email is still one of the best tools to stay connected across the globe, numbers and figures suggest otherwise, especially with Facebook and Twitter reaching certain parts of the world it never had before.

Here’s a line from the report that sums up what’s happening with communication and where it might go someday.

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

The thought of my own cellphone letting friends know I’m close by is kind of scary but it may be something that most people want to see happen. So this begs the question is someone working on something that’ll let our cell phones just read our minds and text the people we want or tweet something you see instantly? Someone has got to be working on it right?

Do you think the days of email being the fastest and easiest way of communicating, coming to an end? Have you been using social networking sites to connect to friends and family instead of traditional email?

(Via Wall Street Journal)