I get a lot of email. I also have quite a few people who talk to me via Instant Messenger. On top of that there are the blogs I read. And then there’s Twitter where you can have a conversation, albeit somewhat public for the most part (though private messages are supported).
Twitter-like services are a contender for replacing email as they provide a method of controlling spam. That’s my main message here considering how much email spam I get all day. I spend a lot of time identifying messages as junk or taking the risk and deleting junk messages from my junk mail folder without a second glance.
I set my instant messenger to only show my presence to friends. And modern IM services allow you to send messages to offline people so they pick them up when they log on next time. Spam is controlled.
I pay attention to the blogs I read because the people there have something to say. With the exception of news.bbc.co.uk I don’t visit any other sites for news. I dump blogs which contain too many ads or which just talk about themselves all the time.
I say all of this after half a dozen spambots just followed me on Twitter. I glanced at their profile names and didn’t follow them. They’re not even in my field of vision.
Why else could it work better then email?
- Updates by RSS (over http rather than smtp/pop/imap which would work through proxies better)
- You follow who you choose rather than just attempting to filter out the crap they send you for free.
- RSS has support for attachments. Isn’t this the only reason to really use email anyway?