It could be time to scrap that old "john_smith1234" e-mail account.
For many Internet users, registering their own name as a web-based e-mail address is next to impossible. Unless they possess a particularly uncommon handle, most users settle for an address that incorporates a number or a nickname.
On Thursday, Yahoo Inc. will roll out two new e-mail services -- Rocketmail and Ymail -- that the company hopes will start a "global race" among millions of Internet users looking to ditch their high school and gimmicky e-mail addresses and score their desired online handle.
Although e-mail remains the most pervasive form of online communication, analysts say younger generations of Internet users are increasingly turning to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to send most of the messages they once sent via e-mail.
In an effort to remain relevant and keep people coming back to their portal sites, Web giants such as Yahoo, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are pushing back against their upstart Web 2.0 rivals and are scrambling to come up with new ways to integrate their instant messaging and e-mail services to make their sites the first destination Web users visit when they go online.
While e-mail and instant messaging services may appear to be underutilized and under-monetized services, they drive hefty amounts of traffic to the main pages of their parent sites, which increases the value of the advertising real estate on those sites, said Canaccord Adams analyst Colin Gillis.
"There are lots of companies trying to extend the e-mail box further and have it be your dashboard for your personal life," he said. "It keeps your brand attached to the user experience."
Although Yahoo doesn't scan users' e-mails for keywords in order to provide contextual advertising the way Gmail does, it does deliver targeted advertising based on the personal information the user provides when they sign up for their account.
Yahoo Mail is the most popular web-based e-mail portal in the world, with more than 266 million unique users in April, topping Hotmail's 264 million users and Gmail's 102 million visitors, according to data from web tracker ComScore Inc. Those numbers do not include users who access their e-mail through a third party program such as Microsoft's Outlook software.
"The reality is the name space for @yahoo.com is nearly saturated," said Naomi Lipowski, head of communications products for Yahoo Canada.
Although Yahoo has faced a declining share of the worldwide search engine market at the hands of Google, its e-mail service grew by seven per cent over the same period last year and remains a big driver of visitors to the Internet pioneer's main page.
Microsoft's Hotmail site is the most popular web e-mail portal in Canada, with more than 19 million monthly visitors. Yahoo's site draws slightly more than 6-million.
While e-mail isn't quite dead among younger generations, it is dying, said Jennifer Simpson, a senior online interaction analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston.
"What we are seeing is that teens increasingly are turning to different forms of communications, such as Facebook and MySpace, to communicate with each other instead of using e-mail." she said.
Eighty per cent of teens reported using e-mail at least once a month in 2007, however the number using social networking sites rose to 72 per cent, Ms. Simpson said.
Teens tend to gravitate to online communities that are popular among their friends, which makes creating buzz around a site integral to increasing traffic, she said.
"If your immediate peer group is instant messaging online, or using Facebook, you're going to be much more motivated to do so," Ms. Simpson said.
Yahoo acquired the rights to Rocketmail in 1997 -- which at the time was a rival service to Hotmail -- and used it to form the backbone of what is now the company's main e-mail service. There are still a handful of Yahoo Mail users who continue to use their original @rocketmail.com addresses.
Canadians interested in getting a rocketmail.com or ymail.com address can begin signing up at 4 p.m. on Thursday through the main Yahoo Mail page.
