An interesting article by the BBC (in the UK) about the decrease in use of email and increase in use of social networking for communications. In the article, they interview the CEO’s of Yammer and FriendFeed as well as a program manager at Microsoft.

As I state in the e-book, Twitter, in particular, and social networking, in general, is an augmentation tool for email, print and video. I don’t think it’ll eliminate email- hardly – but it will make it easier for use to choose the optimal communications vehicle for out content and conversations.

You can read the entire article here, but I’ve included a few key quotes below as food for thought:

“I think it’s a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it,” said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: “It’s been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate.”You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it. Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”

What are your thoughts on the subject?