My friend
@remerge sent me an email asking me my thoughts on
Scoble's recent rant against Twitter's Direct Mesage feature. I started to type a reply, but then it turned into my own rant worthy of a blog entry... and here you are.
10 reasons why Scoble is wrong about Twitter DMs...1. Scoble, your primary point appears to be that DMs should work like email. Everyone on earth already has more than enough email accounts. I don't need another one. DMs are fine the way they are -- private asides between mutual followers.
2. DMs are prioitized: most recent displayed first. DMs aren't meant as priority means of communication. If it was vitally important they would have called or emailed you or sent you a Fedex envelope.
3. IT'S NOT EMAIL! Perhaps you should simply make it know in your Twitter bio that you prefer to be contacted via email. Or use a custom Twitter background to indicate that you despise DMs and will never respond to them. Supplying useful info would be a welcome replacement for that tiled background of your smiling mug.
4. I've never looked at DMs as something to forward. It's a private comment. A whisper in the ear. If the sender wanted others to be privy to the info, would they have @replied? If I DID need to forward it to someone, I don't look at 140 characters as something too onerous to cut-n-paste into an email.
5. People still BCC? What happened to the gospel of openess and transparency? If you're out on a dinner date with one girl, is it still cool to flirt with a girl at another table as long as your date doesn't see you doing it? I no longer use BCCs. I am either open about including the person as a CC, or I forward in it's own message to a third party -- I don't hide someone in a closest to eavesdrop on my conversation. BCC addresses in email seems deceptive to me. (Oh, and DMs aren't email!!)
6. Questions that require more than 140-character replies. Brevity is the soul of wit. Either think of a way to respond within the character limits, or simply tell them they'll have to email their request to receive a proper reply. I doubt the sender asked their question with the intent to confound and frustrate you, but I could be wrong. I'm starting to consider sending a DM to you for just that purpose.
7. You can't respond to a DM unless they Follow you. DUDE! They can't even SEND you a DM unless you Follow each other! In my opinion, that's one of the beautiful things about DM -- no possibility of Spam. If you Follow me, and I check out your Twitter page and decide to Follow you in kind, I've given you permission for interaction (DMS included.) If I didn't find your topics interesting, I simply wouldn't have Followed you. If you're DMs are too frequent or annoying, I can always UN-Follow you (which will put a quick end to your DMs.) It's a two-way ability to contact. A person can't send you a DM unless you complete the circuit.
8. DM auto-responders. I don't know if there's a utility out there or not that enables auto-responses to DMs (if there isn't today, I'm sure someone will build one tomorrow.) But I know you auto-respond to people who Follow. Why not include your "DM hate propaganda" in that message instead? You can also include that sort of info in your Bio blurb and within a branded background (as mentioned above.)
Hell, I'll design a free custom background for you if you just STFU about how much you hate DMs.
9. Did I mention DMs aren't email? If you want to CC people on a Direct Message, you can either choose to reply publicly with an @reply and include anyone you want in-the-know in an @ as well -- or -- computers have this really cool feature where you can select text and then hit CTRL+C to copy text. You can then open your much beloved email program and press CTRL+V to paste the text inside.
10. Moving DMs out of Twitter and into other systems (and by "systems" Scoble means EMAIL programs.) Good news, buddy! Since I first began using Twitter, you can sent the preferences to deliver DMs to your email. It delivers the message in it's entirety and you can then CC, Forward, BCC, Tag, File, Archive, and whatever to your heart's content. I saved this one for last, because I wouldn't have need all ten reasons to counter your own ten reasons -- this simple fact puts an end to 90% of your DM complaints (and realizing that DMs weren't designed to replace email should put an end to the remaining 10%.)
Making an attempt to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the tools you use will help prevent jumping to conclusions about what they can (and can't) do. It's like complaining that a hammer is only good for pounding nails and you hate it because it doesn't
remove nails - but you never bothered to spin it around and use the claw to pry a nail out. Does the problem lie with the tool, or the user?
PS: Apparently I am not the only one who feels Scoble got it wrong. Fellow Twitterer
@DamienBasile also voiced his take on the
Scobleizer's strong feelings about DMs in this article.
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NOTE:
I received a comment on Twitter that I was being a bit ridiculous in this response, in as much that Scoble's intent was to suggest additional features, while I was calling names. I don't fully agree with that assessment (IMHO Scoble's post went to critical, not the creative), and I feel my post was written in the same spirit. In so far that Scoble suggested improvements to the system, so did my own post suggest solutions for his dissatisfaction with the DM feature. Was it sarcastic? Hell yeah.
That's what I do. Referring to him as a "Twit" in the headline was intended as a pun on the rant against Twitter, as well as a pretty accurate representation (according to dictionary.com) of what we were BOTH doing in our posts:twit: to taunt, tease, ridicule, etc., with reference to anything embarrassing; gibe at.Link-baiting? meh.Will I complain if I get some extra traffic from using Scoble's name? Of course not. Did I rail against his opinion purely for Google juice? Hardly. If I agreed with him, there'd be nothing to write about. I wouldn't have bothered to post a glad-handed "me too" just to hopefully attract traffic. I could have posted a dissenting opinion in his original article, but I didn't. I used my own forum to share my side of the story and I don't disagree with anything I posted. ...Except that last line where I said he may have been "acting like a tool." I did remove that line, as I have no proof on whether or not he was indeed acting.Labels: Rant
