Social networking to eclipse business email?

This is the conclusion of analyst firm Gartner, which claims 20 per cent of businesses will use social networking as their method of choice for workplace communications, by 2014.

However the analyst firm believes email will continue to integrate with social networking and it is a matter of time before the latter becomes the dominant communications tool.

"Social paradigms are converging with e-mail, instant messaging, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and presence, creating new collaboration styles."