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.
I have Gmail, but I use it mostly to archive work-related messages. I rarely give out the address.