Social websites beat antisocial emails

Last month, Hitwise reported that visits to the top 25 social networking sites now outnumber visits to webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail. It’s too early to pronounce email dead: for a start, that report only covered webmail, and didn’t look at desktop mail. But it does show an interesting trend.

There are several flaws with webmail: most significantly, it’s plagued by spam. The user experience is one of wading through mountains of junk to get to the occasional friendly greeting from a friend. It can also fall foul of viruses and the threading of discussions can be somewhat primitive (depending on which provider you use).

Facebook solves all these problems and makes for a superior user experience. Although you can receive messages from strangers, you tend to only get messages from people you have already identified as your friend. Since the messages are sent through a webform, the risk of a virus being attached to a message is relatively low. The inbox also threads discussions and presents them on a single page, so you can see the whole correspondence. The site also provides fun new ways to communicate with your friends which go beyond email into interactive quizzes and games of tag.

Doubtless there will come a time when spammers and virus authors penetrate Facebook’s defences, but for now Facebook offers a superior user experience to webmail for most of its users. But even this experience is under threat. While Facebook is good at keeping out spam, the site does tend to plaster adverts and other rubbish on the user’s profile page. If they don’t rein in this excess, they risk harming the fragile relationship they have with users. Ultimately, usability wins.