Interview with Zuckerberg, and will Facebook Replace Email?

Anybody that watched Sarah Lacy's interview with Mark Zuckerberg at the SXSW would agree it was a complete debacle. Lacy's interview style consisted of personal statements commenting on Lacy's prior knowledge and opinion of Facebook, avoiding to ask many of the tough questions that would hopefully trigger some juicy Zuckerberg responses. The crowd rejected her seemingly irrelevant jargon - it was actually quite hilarious to watch (Youtube clip) - taunting Lacy for her lame interview style, which led to few valuable responses on Zuckerberg's end. While Lacy's interview attempt seemingly failed, Lacy was able to get something out of Zuckerberg's mouth. Zuckerberg repetitively described Facebook as an "effective communication tool." While the probable immediate reaction might be something like, "What else is new?," the question I pose is as follows: exactly how effective is Facebook as a communication tool in comparison to other popular forms of internet communication?

First, let's consider the many ways one can communicate on the Facebook platform. Facebook offers user's the ability to message, poke, share photos, share videos, view news feeds, share job listing, share marketplace items, and much more. One could argue these are all forms of communication. That's a tremendous amount of information flowing on the Facebook network, including textual content as well as rich multimedia content. However, for now, lets only consider Facebook's messaging function. With almost 70 million users worldwide, and with 250,000 new registrations per day, will Facebook's messaging overthrow email?

The most standard form of internet based communications over the past 15 years has been email or web mail. While there are few statistics out there about general worldwide email usage, an October 2007 report by technology market research firm, The Radicati Group, estimated that 1.2 billion people used email in 2007. Furthermore, Pew Internet and American Life Project data from March 2007 showed that 56% of the world's total internet users used email as part of a typical day. In regards to email providers, the top US provider was Yahoo by a long shot. In February 2008, a Yahoo executive claimed the company served 260 million email users. What do all of these statistics mean?

These figures express that email is a widely used communication tool worldwide, and over half of daily internet users access some form of web mail each and every day. While the email figures appear daunting, Facebook's excessive growth in traffic could jeopardize email usage, at least in countries where where Facebook has a firm presence, specifically the United States and the UK.

Internet World Stats suggests that roughly 210 million people use the internet in the United States. Taking into account the figures from the Pew Internet and American life report, one could deduce that a little over 100 million Americans in the U.S. use email every single day. Considering these statistics, Facebook usage would appear to be catching up to email because Facebook usage, by new users, is growing faster than internet users are increasing. Who is to say at which point in time Facebook's U.S. growth will reach plateau, reaching critical mass? Who is to say this won't happen until the number of U.S. Facebook users surpasses the 100 million mark (if and when).

While one has to take into consideration that not all Facebook users necessarily message on a daily basis, if U.S. Facebook traffic continues to increase, the "effective communication tool" may eventually rival email. It's a bold consideration, yes, but not unfathomable.