A lot of people are wondering who will be the first to leverage our email histories as a social graph. Clearly, we’re eager to see what an email + social hybrid looks like. The strange part is, why are people waiting for social to be added to email, but not email to be added social?

The core activities on social networks are browsing/stalking and communicating, and the communicating chunk is eating into traditional email. Everything from basic messaging, to wall posts to picture comments used to happen as an email exchange (or not happen at all). This SAI article really strikes a chord:

Instead of exchanging emails or phone numbers with new acquaintances/pickups, gen-myfacers are swapping social network identities.

This indicates an important shift in what people perceive to be the “home base” for their online identity and communication channel. When I was in school, guy-talk has already evolved from “ok, I just met this girl, when do I call her? right away? wait a few hours? days?” to “when do I friend her? msg her or write on her wall? or poke?” (never poke). Social networks just make more contextual sense for social-communication, reserving email for more formal messaging. Not only does it make sense for the user, it’s a important step for social networks to increase their own relevance and permanence to match that of email.

Email and social networks are positioned to step on each other’s toes

Hybrid products aren’t always built from the ground up, it’s often one of the halves making the other obsolete. I’ve tried Xoopit and Xobni, email plugins for Gmail and Outlook respectively which try to build in social and media context into email. The implementation is clumsy at best, partly because the email interface doesn’t lend well to social. But the real snag is that it’s clawing for the social content that just isn’t there. Whoever has more valuable content wins, and in this case, social graph beats email/contact lists. Social networks are in a better position to create a compelling social+email hybrid product.