I’ve noticed lately how many of my friends and colleagues have adopted Gmail addresses. Although Gmail is still a very distant 4th place (after Yahoo!, MSN and AOL) when it comes to the broad Internet audience, it seems to have taken off among the geek set.

I took a look at my LinkedIn contacts. Here are the sources of email addresses among my professional contacts:

• Employer – 40%
• Gmail – 15%
• Yahoo! – 12%
• AOL – 12%*
• Vanity (custom domain name) – 8%
• School alumni association – 4%
• ISP – 2%
• Hotmail – 2%

Some things I found interesting in the data:

• Most people (60%) don’t use their employer’s email address on LinkedIn.
• Gmail has developed a following, despite having come to the email game much later than the others. This share most likely came at the expense of other providers; it’s unlikely that this group just adopted email when Gmail came out.
• Hotmail, which was once synonymous with Web mail, is no longer cool.
• My contacts know better than to tie their email address to their ISP.

Of course, this is all based on a sample of 1.

* Because AOL does not distinguish between employee and non-employee email addresses, I divided the AOL addresses into two groups: those that still work at AOL were counted as employer, the others were counted as AOL. All of the contacts counted as AOL are ex-AOLers who converted their business account.