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1
, MS Live Mail and Gmail, the other two top email providers, generate comparable
traffic (a third of Yahoo each). The time people spend on emails has also been growing. Already in
2004, in a survey by Ferris Research with 840 U.S. businesses
2
, 10% of their workforce spent more
than half the workday (4-plus hours) on email, and 86% engage in personal email correspondence.
Nowadays, even if email has to compete with other social media, according to a 2010 survey by
Nielsen
3
, it is still the third most frequent activity of U.S. Internet users (see Figure
1.1
), and the
top one in mobile Internet activities, at 40%.
Figure 1.1:
Internet usage in the U.S., 2010.
Another Web-based form of communication closely related to email is instant messaging
(often referred to as chats), whose origins also date back a few decades. The key difference between
emails and instant messaging is that email is asynchronous, while instant messaging is synchronous.
synchro-
nous
If you send an instant message, you expect a reply right away, as you would in a face-to-face con-
versations. In contrast, it may be acceptable if an email is answered days later. Instant messaging
asynchro-
nous
has also witnessed a staggering growth. According to Wikipedia, the number of people with instant
messaging accounts was estimated in 2006 to be 340 million worldwide. Currently, this number is
speculated to be approximately 1 billion.
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