Facebook buys Gowalla, YouTube's new design, Tesco's free WiFi and 'Will email die?' - 05/12/11

Facebook acquires Gowalla

Prior to an expected stock market flotation, reports suggest that the social media giant Facebook has bought Gowalla, the location-based check-in service.

It is believed that Gowalla will be integrated into Facebook’s upcoming Timeline, making it easier for users to check-in to locations and share pictures.

Gowalla was one of the first location-based services, alongside Foursquare, to take smartphone check-ins bystorm, but Foursquare became the dominant platform.

Facebook will be opening its first software engineering center outside the West Coast in New York City and the reported acquisition comes near Facebook’s expected IPO - is Facebook trying to boost its value?

YouTube refreshes its look

Last Thursday, video-sharing site YouTube unveiled its new layout, aiming to make navigation easier.  With over 20 billion videos viewed on October, the site wants to be as compelling as normal TV by introducing video channels and adding more content categories, personalised to the user.

According to Crikey News’ Dan Barret, the focus on ‘channels’ and personalised recommendations are Google’s preparations for Google TV integration, which brings personalised content to compatible devices.

Tesco brings free WiFi to its Extra stores in the UK

Following its augmented reality trials and QR virtual store, Tesco continues to impress shoppers with its digital initiatives. Tesco will now be offering free Wi-Fi to Clubcard holders in all of its Tesco Extra stores.  Those that don’t have a number can use the service for 15 minutes every 24 hours, for free.

The service is being provided by O2, who also support Tesco Mobile’s 3G network.

Email will never die! or will it?

According to a report on VentureBeat (don’t forget to check out the infographic), it’ll be a while until social media replaces email as the communication medium of choice.

Email is often associated with spam, newsletters and work, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the most used internet-based medium that we have. Facebook and Twitter have over a billion users put together, but they both fall well behind email in terms of activity.

The article stated that around 60 million Facebook updates are posted each day and 140 million tweets are sent out, whereas 188 billion emails are sent every day.  These numbers highlight how we view email as a more professional and formal point of contact, often relying on it as a primary channel. This might also explain why sites like Facebook have integrated Facebook email addresses.

But if you read this article by Henry Blodget at Business Insider, email usage is slowly in decline. International IT services company Atos recently banned internal email usage amongst its 74,000 employees due to only 10% of daily emails (around 200) being useful. 18% was found to be spam and the rest was just time-consuming to go through. Employees are encouraged to communicate through Facebook, IM and texting.

Further research by Business Insider found that email, although still important and a dominant channel, is "losing share of digital communications, including in the workplace", especially by people between 12 and 24.   

So although email is still very much a part of our daily lives, it's clear that social media is headed to becoming an effective alternative.