Twitter has managed to do to my email inbox what five.sentenc.es couldn’t quite accomplish.
I do not blame five.sentenc.es for its failure; at it’s core, the idea was only good if both parties signed up for the concept. Twitter, however, forces every direct message to be 140 characters or less, meaning every message is concise and to the point.
Confused? Let’s rewind for a bit.
Fighting email bankruptcy.
The big problem I’ve always had with email is that I get too much of it to process in a timely manner. The five.sentenc.es idea gave me a way of explaining my short responses, but didn’t deal with my inbox bloat: limiting responses to five sentences didn’t make incoming emails any shorter or more accurately directed.
Because of this, I now have messages in my inbox that are still awaiting a response, almost six weeks later. Even my Facebook inbox is piling up, as most of my social messages have migrated to that service instead of my regular email account.
Email and Facebook messages are great for long quasi-essays on life and all things wonderful, but are not very good at soliciting quick responses or enticing immediate action.
Twitter to the rescue.
The power of Twitter is not in the platform or the reach, but rather in its constraints. When someone sends me a direct message on Twitter, they have 140 characters with which to convey the necessary information. They can point to other places on the web with relevant background data and context, but the message itself is limited to a short snippet.
That snippet is easy to digest, but more importantly, easy to act upon. It may not contain the same information as an email (which is why email is still vital to communication) but it creates imperatives for action, a feature that is not inherent to email but needs, instead, to be explicitly created and explained.
Not everyone loves Twitter for direct messaging, but that’s because they use that messaging in a different way than I do. Scoble’s complaints about Twitter DMs are centered upon the limitations of the tool and technology without realizing that this form of messaging isn’t meant to replace email, but create new forms of actionable conversation.
All that to say one simple thing: if you need to reach me and need an immediate answer, send me a DM on Twitter. I can almost guarantee a 12-hour response window.
Sameer - great post. The bit of it not replacing email is very true - it’s used differently and the limitations and default to public are opening up some profound opportunities to change how we collaborate and communicate. I don’t get it yet - I don’t know if anyone does - but there is something different happening.
Thanks for the post (HT to twitter for being the channel I found it through :-). Heh… Twitter v. feeds is another interesting bit..
Cheers!
RT @vasta: I wrote a post on my blog on how Twitter direct messaging was overtaking my email just yesterday: http://bit.ly/lcEO
Hey Michael, just wanted to address something you mentioned about Twitter vs feeds. There was a time before when I thought Twitter would become my “social rss aggregator” feeding me great links from people I trust.
It didn’t.
The reason? Volume.
I probably only process about 4-6% of all the tweets in my stream, which means I not only miss a lot of links, but I can’t go back to them for posterity. An RSS reader, on the other hand, lets me go back to posts I haven’t read and process them whenever I feel like it — and not have to be subject to the vagaries of time, volume, and my processing power.
Same thing for me though that it didn’t replace the reader but gave me great value through ‘random’ post ‘discovery”. I then cut 90% of my reader feeds - now only subscribed to my favourite blogs. Much more efficient.
Actually, you’re right. I’ve recently gone down from 2400 feeds to 300. I have Twitter to thank for a lot of that.
I realize the point you’re making, and I’m sympathetic to e-mail overload (feeling it a bit today). Still, I’m really, really wary of becoming too reliant on Twitter DMs specifically (because of the multitude of failwhales that seem to still be quite common, thanks Rails), but also on centralized social network apparatuses in general. I feel it’s very much taking a step backward in terms of the Internet’s founding goals of decentralization and distribution of responsibility, and turning the clock back on the 30 years of technology stack that makes things like PGP-encrypted email possible and relatively easy.
Most of all, this trend places the responsibility for the delivery of your (important) messages on a party who is, in truth, accountable to neither the sender nor the receiver. If my outgoing mail server is botching things, I can vote with my wallet and find a better ISP; ditto for my incoming mail. If we place too much of our faith and social capital in these walled gardens like Facebook, we have a lot to lose.
Happy birthday David!
Thanks for the comment. Very well thought out and I completely agree with the necessity for distributed networks instead of proprietary walled gardens, especially when it comes to messaging. (Part of the reason I’m no longer on Facebook.)
That being said, the reason I like Twitter direct messaging so much is that these are messages that don’t need to be saved, archived, kept, or processed in posterity. In fact, once I see the DM, I hardly ever (pretty much never) look at it (or need to look at it) again. Instead of messages, then, they become instant action reminders that float in and out of my consciousness as the reminders are sent.
It would be nice to have some sort of distributed way of providing these instant, fleeting, and impermanent spurs to action, but as of now, I can only think of Twitter that does this in a way that is easy to use and pervasive.