As Facebook and other services find new ways for people to communicate, Internet analysts wonder if the creation of Facebook Messages will replace e-mail in the near future, making e-mail services like Gmail and others obsolete.

Facebook may replace typical email systems

Last month, Facebook launched its own e-mail-like service called Facebook Messages. The service includes a compilation of e-mail, instant messaging and text messaging. Internet analysts, like Clint Boulton of eweek.com, have said that because Facebook is so popular, its new messaging service could inhibit future prosperity for other e-mail sites such as Yahoo mail, Gmail, Microsoft Live Hotmail, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook for career use.

“People use Facebook for communication because of its social networking,” freshman computer science major Michael Stephens said. “It’s more than just sending your words to an @.com address. It is more like actually talking to the person.”

Facebook incorporates personal relationships

According to Boulton, Facebook has more than 500 million users, and has quickly become one of the most popular social networking websites since Mark Zuckerburg founded the site in February 2004. Internet analysts, like Clint Boulton, have wondered if e-mail will still be able to hold its own when put up against Facebook’s service, which offers the same services in addition to interactive games and quizzes.

“While I still use e-mail to communicate with institutions, all of my personal relationships are facilitated by Facebook,” sophomore Sarah O’Donnell said. “It’s the first place I check when I get online.”

Teens rarely interact with e-mail

The demographic of e-mail users has changed. According to Dave Chaffey, founder of Smart Insights, a company focused on digital media marketing, only a small percentage of teens have continued to use e-mail because of the annoyance of spam even though on websites such as Facebook, teens often intermingle openly with propaganda of diverse businesses bordering their homepages.

In a poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal, 17 percent of those surveyed said they would use Facebook Messages as their main e-mail, while 62 percent said they would not use Messages as their primary e-mail service, and 20 percent said they weren’t sure if they would use the Facebook service.

Business owners still use e-mail

Clint Boulton, an Internet analyst, wrote in an article that e-mail has been working fine for businesses. A business owner can simply pull out his cell phone, which most likely has Internet, and communicate to the company through the use of that.

Gartner research, one of the world’s leading information technology research and advisory companies, predicted that by 2014, only about 20 percent of business-minded Internet users will use social networking services in place of e-mail.

Biola professor Shieu-Hong Lin said he doesn’t see Facebook Messages as a replacement of e-mail.

“Instead, it is a nice step toward the integration and fusion of communication services over various forms of information such as videos, voicemails, pictures, text messages and so forth,” Lin said.