There have been some views in blogosphere recently relating to the future of emails. A few days ago I saw a post on New York Times blog about Yahoo and Google turning emails into social networks. Then there have been some threads claiming that email is dying. Coming across contradicting news and views is not that rare, however what makes it interesting is that people claiming that email is the next big thing, and those who claim that it’s going to die, cite the same reason to support their argument - and that is Social Networking.

How is that possible? Let’s quickly see both the sides of the story in a little more detail.

First, how emails can be made social network aware. Since email providers like Yahoo and Google already have a lot of information who users interacts, how frequently they interact with them and so son, they have much of social graph data about the user that sites like Facebook and Orkut have. Yahoo’s “Inbox 2.0″ for example is going to highlight messages from those who you interact more frequently with. They also plan to have people create their public profiles that will be linked to their name on the email. Yahoo/Google already have a lot of information that these user profiles will have based on the kind of widgets they have on MyYahoo/iGoogle, kind of music/video they see, what kind of products are they searhing for etc.

This strategy makes sense to me. Now let’s look at other opinion where people claim that email is going to be a thing of past soon. The idea being that the “gen-next”/teenagers rather use social networking tools like Facebook or Twitter or even IM to communicate instead of sending emails since it’s easier to broadcast messages to friends using these tools. They also let users be more informal as compared to email while drafting the message.

Ok, this argument too makes sense. So which way are the things going finally?

As of now, both emails and the newer communications channels like social sites etc have a lot of overlap when people have to communicate informal/fun stuff with each other. I think for formal/longer communications, email is still going to be used in the foreseeable future. But when it comes to casual conversations, it’s easy to see that email is not going to be primary means of communication in the years to come and the current overlap between emails and social tools is going to reduce in this area.

So it seems even though email providers are working hard to keep/increase the relevance of emails, they do face tough challenges from newer methods of communications in the time to come. Probably they already realize this, that’s why they are trying to give a social color to their emails, however they need to be really careful since converting email into something that it’s not fundamentally, may backfire.