Internet & Technology

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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As described on FingerPrint website “This report shows the current state of the email client market. It serves as the largest ever study of its kind, with data from almost 250 million email recipients.” Data compiled 24 February 2010.

Yet another player has entered the email fray.  Facebook announced their entry as a big time part of the email battles.  Why?

The reason is simple.  Facebook wants to keep you on their site to sell the ads that will fuel their corporation.  They don't want you to leave and use Hotmail, gmail, Yahoo or Outlook Express or any other email service.  Email is a big time application used by corporations and grandparents.

For reference see our article:

Who are the biggest email sites?  You may be surprised at the order in which they are ranked by number of users, but the above chart shows the leaders.

1. Hotmail & Outlook

2. Yahoo

3. gmail

4. Apple Mail

We rate them as to speed and functionality this way.

1. gmail is best.  It's easy to use and has lots of technology to come

2. Hotmail is good and is attempting to mirror gmail.  Forget Outlook and switch to Hotmail or gmail

3. Yahoo gets the lowest rating. Its functional, but awkward.  It has a surprising number of users, however.

4. Forget the others.

Facebook will have a hard time prying users away from the big three.  Once people get an email address, they tends to stick with it and if they are corporations, this tends to be cast in concrete. 

Very few realize you can switch and still keep your old email address and just bring in mail from your old address.  It's transparent and easy to do.

Also, Facebook is not in competition for the 'Cloud'* and it is doubtful if they will ever build the application base around their email that Microsoft and Google are doing. They are trying to fill in the gaps to keep you on their social network to sell ads. Such things as server based applications would be difficult for them and drive them into a market that will make them stumble.

If you don't believe the competition is tough, take a look at the above chart showing Lotus Notes as having .4%  If you did not notice the dot, it reads 4 tenths of one percent of the email. 

Remember Lotus (now owned by IBM)?  They were the world's leaders in spread sheets.  They were called 'Lotus Spreadsheets.'  Today spreadsheets are called Excel Spreadsheets by 99% of the world's users of such technology.  They use it out of Microsoft's Office product.  Google wants you to use their look-a-like on the Cloud.

Remember AOL?  Notice where they are.  You'd have to be brave to switch to AOL mail.

The Cloud is a combination of local computing with large, Internet server based applications that use the server storage farms and computing power so that you don't have to worry about the latest version or your storage and back-up

See our article on Cloud Computing

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Tuesday, November 16, 2010