• BBC News, Monday, March 16, 2009 11:45 AM

Are status updates on sites like Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed a new form of communication? At the South by SouthWest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, digital media execs said the growth in such services heralds the beginning of a new real-time Web that may come to replace email.

"We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0," said David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer. "What people want to do on social networks these days is post status updates. We think it's all people want to do." Yammer is a business-to-business social network that aims to make communication within companies and organizations easier. It's one of a growing number of services that lets users share status updates. "I think it's a new form of communication; not quite email, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavor to it," said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of Gmail, while at Google. FriendFeed lets users share content from services like Twitter and Facebook, and comment directly on the postings in real time.

For all the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, with 175 million users, is the dominant platform for status updates. "It's been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate," Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at Facebook, told the BBC. "You used to email content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to email it to and you didn't know if your friends even wanted to see it. Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it."

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