Sharing interest news or content on the Web is as prevalent as the Internet itself.  Nearly ninety percent (90%) of adult Internet users revealed that they actively share content with others via email according to Sharpe Partners, an award-winning interactive marketing firm. The study on viral marketing found that 63% of respondents shared content at least once a week with as many as 25% sharing content daily or almost daily.  The report identified news content as the second most popular category (56%), after humor.

Email usage patterns, however, are beginning to change, as social networks and other community sites are providing inboxes of their own.  With the growth of social networks like Facebook and Myspace, there as been a lot of talk lately about whether they will replace email as the primary form of communication. Earlier on in the year, Saul Hansell of the New York Times in his insightful post: Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network explored this recent phenomena and suggests that ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo mail are taking the “The Facebook Threat” seriously.

Although email is probably not going to go away anytime soon, its undeniable that more and more people are heading in the direction of using social network as their preferred means of communicating. It is no coincidence that at Grouptivity, we have been moving our sharing tools and distribution network in that direction.  In coming weeks, we will be announcing a powerful set of social networking tools that allow bloggers and publisher to quickly and easily distribute popular content from their blogs or news sites directly into social networks like Facebook. This means that readers of publications in Grouptivity’s content network (such as Midland Reporter/Telegram – MyWestTexas, a member of the Hearst family of publications) can choose to either share interesting articles via email or social bookmarking, or access and share them directly on Facebook using Grouptivity’s Social News application.