Ah there’s nothing like a grand, sweeping statement to start the day. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has told a conference in the States that e-mail may soon become obsolete.
Ready for her close up, Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg
Her prediction that the email will go the same way as the letter, telegram and carrier pigeon came at Nielsen Consumer 360 conference in Las Vegas this week, Sanberg told the audience how teenagers are using email less and less and how she feels there’s a possibility it may soon die out.
TechRadar reports that Sandberg – who manages the company’s overseeing sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications – told the crowd: “I hate to be the bearer of bad news but in consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today.
“And the latest figures say that only 11% of teenagers e-mail daily. So e-mail — I can’t imagine life without it — is probably going away. So what do teenagers do? They SMS and increasingly, they use social networking.”
Sandberg didn’t cite any more in-depth figures or research on the matter, though she’s really just talking about conversation here, and to a great degree for many of us email is already more of a business tool than anything else considering the various forms of presence out there.
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