[deffibaugh]

I don't think any Social App will be able to replace email unless it is just as distributed and private as email is. Maybe if the Social App ran entirely on the users machine or they could run their own servers then it would have a chance to overtake email. Maybe something like Diaspora? The fact is, people send IMPORTANT emails. People who send these emails aren't going to have their correspondence in the cloud being raked through to squeeze advertising money out.

[epynonymous]

i think the privacy issue could be very easily taken care of by providing multi-tenancy and administrative access so a company could control everything to do with the content.

your point about social app companies trying to make money out of the companies using this is valid, however, today Salesforce.com provides software in the cloud that stores tons of information about sales deals (including dollar figures), contacts (which is priceless), user behaviors, etc. yet lots of the fortune 500 trust them to host and keep this data.

[deffibaugh]

I think the difference, for me at least, is that I have to pay for Salesforce's products. I trust a company with my data much more if I am paying them than I do a company that is not charging but instead using my data for advertising purposes. There is a lot more incentive to look at the data if you need to target ads at people.