I recently heard that Hotmail impressions have been dropping over the past couple months... This is not surprising at all (to me), but it should be alarming. My colleague James Prudhomme has a theory for it, and I think he's hit the nail on the head.

You can blame the social networks that have integrated messaging and facilitate sharing photos, links, and promoting events, all things that email has traditionally been used for (outside of business). This is especially evident in the recent explosion of Facebook users, which has seen meteoric growth in the Toronto region (over 700,000 users in the Toronto network) and even within Bell (over 9,000 users in the Bell Canada network), and which provides all the above functionality in addition to other traditional Sympatico revenue-generating offers like classifieds and videos.

News.com recently ran a feature on this cultural shift among teens, who are leading the charge. This is not just a trend. This is a real shift in the way people communicate online. This is also a wake-up call for our business. I have personally noticed in the last 2-3 months that my email inboxes are seeing just as much spam as ever, but only a fraction of the legitimate messages I used to get as my friends and colleagues have turned to social networks for, go figure, social networking. Email, as a format, is fast becoming redundant.

Time to start brainstorming!