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Bah Facebook! Enough already!

Drowning in email, social networking, linking with others and being tied to the laptop and mobile phone? It's gonna get worse.....

Richard Harper, writing in The Observer, laments the trend of where we are heading with Facebook announcing this:

"Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO, announced that his company was to launch a new email messaging system. He wasn't seeking to elbow in on free email services. This service would be "something different". Traditional email is made for intermittent exchanges of content, he explained, whereas this new messaging medium will support "ongoing conversations".

And:

"The issue here is how different communications technologies afford different sorts of ways of being in touch. Take another example: when I post on my Facebook account, I mostly do not want an instant response. All I am doing is raising a flag to describe what I am thinking or doing, hoping that at some later time friends might come back to make conversation – on the phone, or at the pub, or even on Facebook itself the next day, where they might post some remarks next to my own: "You were having a bad day yesterday, well, I am having an even worse one today!"

But look at the mind-boggling stats:

  • There are now more than 500 million active Facebook users, with 50% logging on to the site on any given day. Worldwide, users collectively spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook.
  • Google's email service Gmail ended July with 186 million worldwide users, a 22% increase from the same time a year ago. Both Microsoft's Windows Hotmail (nearly 346 million users) and Yahoo's email (303 million users) are larger, but aren't growing as rapidly.
  • As of September, Twitter, which launched in 2006, had 175 million registered users posting an estimated 95 million tweets each day.
  • There are now more than five billion mobile phone connections worldwide. In many regions, penetration exceeds 100%, meaning more than one connection per person. Research earlier this year found that teenagers in American now use text as their main method of communication, with more than 30% of US teens sending more than 100 texts a day.
  • More than 25% of the UK's population – some 16 million people – accessed the internet from mobile phones in December 2009. Nearly half those total minutes online via mobile devices were spent at Facebook Mobile – 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn – with Google on 400m in a very distant second."

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