Ok, this is admittedly silly, but in light of recent conversations about email being in danger because of social media services like Facebook and Twitter, it seemed worth mentioning – especially when you consider that Facebook has suggested in the past that email is “probably going away”.

You may recall earlier this month when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Priscilla Chan got a dog named Beast and created a Facebook Page for it (Beast currently has over 75,000 fans by the way). Beast has posted the above photo with the text, “Just writing some emails. Typical morning.”

I’ve got to wonder if it is typically Zuckerberg updating Beast’s page. He and Chan are listed as the only page owners. It’s funny to think about the young billionaire sitting around posting Dog photos while his company is taking over the world in so many ways.

Beast has been fairly active on Facebook. There have even been a great deal more updates made to Beast’s page than to Zuckerberg’s. Of course, he does have a reputation for keeping things casual.

In January, Facebook began rolling out its own messaging service and email addresses more rapidly, after introducing them in November.

“We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, ‘Ok, I’m going to shut down my Yahoo Mail account or my Gmail account,” Zuckerberg said when the social inbox was introduced. He later added that maybe one day people will start to say that email isn’t as important as it was before, though it “will always be a part.”

A recent report from comScore and the Pew Internet Project found that people are still using email quite heavily – just less for casual conversation.  ”Overall, when you look at how many teens have ever sent an e-mail, it’s most of them, so it’s still being used,” said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist with the Pew Internet Project. “It just isn’t used for communicating with people you’re primarily communicating with in your life, namely your friends, and it’s absolutely true that text messaging and messaging through social networks has supplanted e-mail messaging to friends.”

Other studies have found that social media services like Facebook and Twitter can help to drive email marketing.

You can expect email to continue to grow along with mobile phone use as well. comScore recently found mobile email usage is seeing significant growth.

It would also appear that more dogs are starting to adopt the popular communication channel.