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Many others have written about e-mail address prejudice (see Lifehacker and Gizmodo) and I have to confess to having a strong case of it. What does this mean? As soon as I see or hear what e-mail address someone has, I make all sorts of judgements. One of these is an assumption of what cell phone they use. The opposite is also somewhat true.
Now let me say that many of my beloved friends and family have many of these e-mail accounts and phones…. no hard feelings.
| E-mail Address | Cell Phone |
| AOL.com | Motorola Razr or similar |
| Hotmail.com | Samsung or LG Flip or Candy bar phone, maybe a “txting” phone |
| Yahoo.com | Blackberry or Palm Pre |
| Gmail.com | iPhone or Android Phone |
| Custom domain (usually firstname@lastname.com) | Android Phone or Jailbroken iPhone |
Now of course these aren’t hard lines. I know folks with Hotmail and blackberries, and I know GMAIL users with blackberries, but overall, I find these pairings quite frequent.
Why? I think one’s e-mail address service is generally representative of adoption of new technologies. Those that have AOL or Hotmail addresses are mostly saying, “I know these new services/phones are better but I don’t care….” In fairness, AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are making efforts to improve their services to keep up with GMAIL, but IMHO, it’s too little, too late. Those that switch to GMAIL realize very quickly why it’s (IMHO again) such a superior service. Yahoo and Microsoft should be particularly ashamed of ceding market share when they used to have such market-leading products. I’m also not saying that platforms like Blackberry or Palm OS are clearly inferior, but the full implications of their sparse app stores and/or outdated phones/operating systems/UIs mean that there are clearly tradeoffs with not adopting one of the two pioneering mobile phone platforms.
Like many prejudices, making broad assumptions means you’re going to be very wrong quite a bit of the time, but in this case, I’ve found that I’m right far more often…What do you guys think? Is this true? do you have other suggestions to add to the list? What else does someone’s email address or phone choice say about them?
Related Articles
- Yahoo Mail to get ‘Minty’ freshen-up (news.cnet.com)
- Yahoo Revamps Mail Service (online.wsj.com)
- Email UI Faceoff – GMail vs Hotmail vs Yahoo – The results (1stwebdesigner.com)
