Social Networking Eclipsing Email?

Many observers have noted that one of the big changes in technology adoption over the past half decade is the preponderance of "consumer" technology compared to "enterprise" technology tools. Not only are consumer tools reshaping enterprise applications but most of the innovation now occurs on the consumer side as well.

Internet analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley says that social network use is bigger than email in terms of both aggregate numbers of users and time spent, and is still growing rapidly.

Meeker attributes social networking’s success to the fact that it’s a “unified communications plus multimedia creation tool in your pocket.” The intriguing notion there is that tools not originally envisioned as part of the unified comnmunications feature set are now in some cases supplanting those features.

In fact, consumer tools in this case seem to be displacing at some of the utility enterprise unified communications services and applications were envisioned as supplying.

Social networking passed email in terms of time spent in 2007, hitting about 100 billion minutes a month globally and now is twice that.

Social networking passed email in terms of raw user numbers in July of 2009, with more than 800 million users. Given the rate at which Facebook has been growing, that number is probably now closer to a billion users, she says.

In many ways, social networking is to unified communications as consumer VoIP was to enterprise IP telephony: all the attention was the latter, not the former, but most of the growth has occurred in the former, not the latter.