Twitter and Email

So I went to bed early today, and woke up late. It was a white out in Chicago and just felt like a good day to sleep.

When I got up, my blackberry was blinking like crazy. I had 80 unread message. But not all these messages were created equal. I had 34 emails, 44 twitter SMSs and 2 other SMSs.

The first thing I read were the direct SMSs, one was friend in Chicago who wasn't acting like an 80 year old man last night and wanted to see if I would go out. The 2nd was from a drunk friend in Med school who had just finished Finals.

I then went to the twitter messages, I had a bunch of replies from some heavy twittering I had done last night. There were a lot of twitter feeds regarding the TARP and auto bailout and there were a few friends musing about the bailout.

After I sorted through the twitters, I went to the email.

Of the 34 messages, probably only 4 were to me. I replied to 2 of them, but then instantly deleted 30 of them without reading. These emails were various kinds of spam, sale notices and so on.

My point here is that email might be a somewhat damaged, if not broken model. I feel like email used to be a lot more exclusive. If you really wanted to get a hold of someone, you sent them an email. You knew they would check it, you knew they would reply.

Now I still read all the emails from my friends, and I try and respond to all of them. I'm not too important to respond to email like some of my friends think they are. But still, I think that twitter is fast becoming how I prefer to communicate. It forces you to be succinct, brief, pithy and all the things good messages should be.

I'm just talking about personal communication here, I don't expect @replies to become a corporate mainstay. But what I am saying is that the way I (and many others I feel) is changing. It's great to see change and I definitely saw it in my own actions this morning...
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry