Your “tethered to the construct” observation resonates with me. I’ve been watching my own behavior since reading this study and what seems to happen for me is if I really, REALLY want someone to get something I email it. If I want to be reasonably sure they get it I tweet or digg or whatever. Yes, I guess I’m tethered by the expectation that email will deliver.

There’s probably a PhD in this question for someone somewhere.

In some ways, the survey is surprising to me, in other ways it isn’t.

I think as Nancy pointed out, there’s a generational difference between older web users and younger ones. E-mail is the domain of boomers & Gen Xers because that’s the medium they’re conditioned to using. Gen Y & younger have no such conditioning.

To them everything is a web-based service. Free, open source, and ubiquitous. So to them, messaging platforms are just that: platforms that just sit on top of the web. All you need is a good browser.

Email is proprietary with client software on your machine, an email server that sits on a box somewhere else, and the network that email sits on isn’t instantly accessible in most cases. But a lot of us are tethered to that construct, so it’s easier for us to interact with. Plus, since it’s a little more closed off than something like Twitter, trusting the content provider may be a bit easier to do.

I also get most of my blog readers through my e-newsletter.

Most of my readers are too busy to sort through all of the online information. Like your readers, they prefer to receive information through their email inbox.

But the email part is interesting for other reasons. My experience is that Gen Y doesn’t really use email all that much. So I suspect if the survey took into account age, the results would be differ dramatically by age group.