Yesterday I was part of the Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet panel at the SXSW conference. I've been interested to see what the key take away would be for people that attended the panel and it seems the votes are in. The BBC report on the panel is titled Social networks 'are new e-mail' which is extremely similar to the coverage in the VentureBeat report titled Is the social stream the new email?

Although the "X will kill Y" spin is always good for spicing up a technology story there is an interesting trend that is worth watching. For many people, email serves multiple purposes. It is a way to have conversations and also a way for them to share information. However activity streams such as the Facebook news feed, Twitter and the what's new feed on Windows Live are creating new ways for people to share things about themselves or that they find interesting with others. Joe Kraus of Google described this as the shift from active to passive sharing.

These days I'm more likely to post an interesting link by sharing it on Twitter and have it filter out to my social networks on Facebook and Windows Live than I am to share it via email and risk spamming a bunch of my friends and coworkers. As more people embrace social networking, the trend of using email for certain types of sharing will likely decline. It is already interesting to note that Perez Hilton's #1 Traffic Source Is Facebook and it would be interesting to see if this is a trend that crosses more categories of sites (e.g. I wonder if YouTube gets more traffic from email services or from social networks). 

Where things get interesting is in trying to bridge the gap between active and passive sharing. Sending an email about your latest vacation pics may be too intrusive but you also may not want to just relegate them to being shown in your friends' feeds to be gone from sight if your friends don't log-in in time. David Sacks of Yammer mentions Twitter's @reply feature as one way to bridge this gap. On Twitter, you can push content out into the ether not caring particularly if your friends read it or not but when you do it is just a special character away to send a directed message to them. It will be interesting to see if other services figure out a feature that provides the same functionality as Twitter's @reply and is similarly lightweight.

PS: Food for thought, can you imagine the 25 random things meme on Facebook spreading as effectively if it was an email chain letter?

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