Email Providers Jump on Social Media Bandwagon
October 23, 2007
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An article from the Wall Street Journal announced that web service providers (Yahoo, AOL, etc) are adding social media features such as tracking friends and creating personal profile pages.
According to the article, these social media additions are a move by email service providers to increase competition and gain back market share that is being lost through social networks like Facebook.
So the question is - Will these “me too” tactics pay off?
This is debatable. Jumping on the social media bandwagon is easy and sometimes profitable, but at the heart of a social media success is inevitably and always disturbingly the value proposition.
After all, Facebook users use the network’s contact features instead of email for many reasons, some that include its convenience, it’s informality, and the ability to connect with friends, family, or acquaintances regardless of contact information or email service provider.
So, for these email service providers to really increase market share, instead of offering nifty features for its current members in an attempt to steal users from Facebook and MySpace, it must be willing to consider how to better integrate these applications into them. They must answer questions like: If a user has a profile on Facebook, will they be able to pull it into an email service provider’s social media application? Or at the very least, will users be able to pull in contacts from their Facebook and MySpace accounts?
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2 Responses to “Email Providers Jump on Social Media Bandwagon”
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Don’t leave Google out of the equation !
Yes, Google is currently working on a project to enable its users to see “friend” updates on their personal homepage. A great idea, but with the drawback that the integration is planned to be for Facebook and Orkut only.