How twitter makes me look at emails differently
April 10th, 2008 | by Laurent FP |
For short, twitter is addictive. It’s like using SMS but having all your friends know what others are talking about. You can interject, complement, deny, speak, yell or simply listen. The messages are short, 140 character long. Typing a message involves so few steps that it’s easy to say “@nicolas_ going 4 coffee”… no email address, no phone number. You get to discover new people, ideas and trends everyday. Basically it’s more social than you think.
There is only one drawback. The messages are floating on your timeline. Depending on how many friends you have, each message may have a shelf life of less than 15 minutes! Beware, if you are not following it closely, you may never know what was said.
So how is this affecting my email usage? Simply put, I continuously monitor Twhirl running in the background looking at the thread of messages going back and forth. If I read something interesting I answer, otherwise I let go of it. In comparison, my email inbox seems very still, the subjects very dry. Emails have been piling up and they are simply not calling my name… I can’t see the faces of my friends… and I really don’t want to read pass the subject line!
You’re going to tell me that there’s a ton of stuff twitter can’t do. You’re right. I don’t know if I read a particular message or not. Do I really care? And, although there is no way to send attachments, our documents are now mostly online (google docs, unfuddle, basecamp, dropbox, youtube, flickr, smugmug, …). It’s more convenient to send a URL to your recipients than actually sending the files.
5 Responses to “How twitter makes me look at emails differently”
By Leafar on Apr 11, 2008 | Reply
That’s it… faster, better, funnier.
For the attach part, you should try pownce (Kevin R.’s startup).
The thought that actually came to my mind is that we should use subject in mails like twitter.
Allow 140 characters to say what you will be talking about. Young will probably beheave like that and make the mail better again. it’s only a matter of usage.
Give me twitter line in subject and a mail shooter (a place to just write @ d “all”OpenCoffe would be like steroids)and I’ll get back to email in a sec’ because that’s why i’m using twitter for.
I do use only the web for twitter because i can close it like i do with my thunderird.
Laurent work faster !!
By Nicolas (aka nicolas_) on Apr 11, 2008 | Reply
Too much people do not use the subject line of emails properly, using them like teasers -”Answer me asap !”, “Did I told you ?”-, or with one single meaningless word -”Tonight”, “house”, “Ruby”-.
It’s too hard to change the mentality of everyone, but hey… there must be a way to show emails in a different fashion!
By Laurent FP on Apr 11, 2008 | Reply
Let me try Pownce once more but I really prefer thinking about converging all of those multiplying communication channels.
As for shooting messages (in the broad sense) using shortcuts and across media makes perfect sense. The body of an email becomes the attachment!
By Erwood on Apr 11, 2008 | Reply
Speaking of @, even with a twitter reshuffle, it might be dead anyway. A friend recently told me that his teen-age sister did not like @ as you never knew if the recipient had received it!
By Laurent FP on Apr 12, 2008 | Reply
Completely agree about the subject line. As for the @, I’m thinking that its better to be sure the person has had a “chance” to read it (on twitter) than being unsure that they have received an email message.