Social Networks Overtake Web-based Emails in the UK

If you've been following the statistics of social networks recently , you'll find that social networks are starting to eat into the web-based email providers' dominance of the internet messaging market. That simply means that visits to social networks seems to have overtaking those of web-based email services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, amongst others.

A recent survey by Hitwise, an online intelligence service revealed that for the first time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services. In October, the top 25 social network sites including Myspace, Facebook, Bebo received 5.17% of all UK internet visits, compared to 4.98% for email services.




Well, we can say that this trend will increase in the coming months as the UK web-user population is choosing to communicate more with friends via social networks rather than email. And there's no doubt that these social networks also refer as much traffic to other websites as web-based email services.

Whatever happens, I think that social networks would continue to rely on the technologies and services of web-based email for their expansion. And users would still need these web-based emails to communicate.