In the past, we discussed ways that social media has transformed the internet, having been so bold to say that social networks fundamentally changed the way we consume online media. So, if social media and social networks are these all-powerful game changers, shouldn’t they eventually make a newsworthy impact on email, the internet’s original “killer app?”

We decided to churn some quick data to test our hypothesis that “Consumption of social media decreases email use.” First, we broke the online population into four groups. The first three are terciles of social media consumption in minutes. The fourth is a group that doesn’t use social media at all. We then looked at each segment’s time of web based email consumption over the course of a year. Finally, we subtracted the email consumption of those that do not use social media from those that do, basically to show a lift over possible external forces. Clearly, there are more robust approaches that could be taken (controlling for factors other than consumption for example) but for the sake of this simple experiment, we tried to keep it straightforward.

Here’s what we found:

At least from this small experiment our hypothesis was disproved, but interesting nonetheless.  It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed – particularly for the highest social media users. Intuitively this makes some sense.  Social media sites like Facebook send messages to your inbox every time someone comments on your posting or something you’ve participated in, and depending on your settings, can send updates on almost every activity.  Also, it’s perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings.

This modest kitchen sink experiment further stoked our curiosity; the next step is to take a more robust approach to develop correlations between platforms to understand if this relationship is different across specific demographics and behavioral groups – rather than by levels of consumption.

If you have other theories or questions, we’d love to see your comments or questions below. Of course, you can contact us by email or social media.

Today, the likes of Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Veoh, and Hulu are betting it has.  Instead, they’re throwing their resources into developing a new video source: online streaming movies.

These new media titans may have the right idea, according to recent research by Nielsen that found online streaming video usage almost doubled in the U.S. between 2006 and 2007.  A separate survey conducted by Nielsen in 2007 found that 40% of respondents had streamed some type of video, while just over 10% had downloaded a full movie.

But while consumer generated media streaming has taken off online, movie content streaming accounts for only about 1% of all online streaming activity, according to Nielsen. 

But that trend may be changing fast, according to a new report by Nielsen PreView.  So far in 2008, movie content streaming has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing the growth of streamed consumer generated media, the most popular streamed content, by a factor of eight.

Online video streamers are also an increasingly engaged lot, with more people streaming online movies for longer periods of time.  Between November 2007 and May 2008, those who streamed 30 minutes or more of online video grew by 4%, according to Nielsen. 

What’s trigging the growing popularity of online streaming video?  In part: broadcast TV content available for streaming online. 

Consumers who streamed more than 43 minutes of broadcast content during a recent seven-month period had the highest likelihood of being online movie content streamers, according to Nielsen’s report.

Read Nielsen PreView’s report.

Learn more about other recent Nielsen PreView studies on R-Ratings and 3-D films.