Scoble Doesn’t Like Twitter’s Direct Messages

Robert Scoble doesn’t like Twitter’s direct messages:

[from Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive 10 reasons why Twitter Direct Messages suck (and so do Facebook’s) «]

OK, over on Twitter they have this feature. It’s called “Direct Messages.” It means you can send me a Tweet that no one else can see. A LOT of people try to use this feature with me and I really, really, hate it. How many people? I have 4,388 direct messages.

Twitter isn’t the only one that sucks, either. Facebook has a Messaging feature too. 1,249 messages are waiting for me there.

I do NOT answer in either place most of the time. Why? Here’s 10 reasons why they suck and why I’d much rather you email me at scobleizer@gmail.com or, simply, just ask me a question in public!

Without enumerating Robert’s “ten reasons why”, like me summarize. His post is a thinly disguised argument for adding a long list of email-like features into Twitter direct messages (and Facebook’s I guess). I have a simple recommendation for Twitter to avoid that headache, and perhaps make some money (ka-ching!):

• As part of a Twitter pro account, the user can opt to enable email integration of their Twitter account. This provides an email address associated with your Twitter account.
• The email address would look something like ‘mrboffin@twitter.com’, where ‘mrboffin’ is the Twitter account name.
• The Pro account user could redirect all direct messages to their external email account, like ‘mrboffin@gmail.com’. These would appear to be coming from ‘mrboffin@twitter.com’.
• The pro user would then be free to cc, bcc, forward and so on, to others’ email accounts or other Pro users’ Twitter mail accounts.
• As a result things that need to migrate out of Twitter direct messages could easily do so. Mr Boffin could simply decide that a direct message request requires him to email the recipient and bunch of other business colleagues, and the chatter moves into email.
• The Pro user could also forward emails (presumably short ones) to their Twitter email account.
• Twitter could also support receipt of emails to that account, and those that were friends known to Mr Boffin — from people he is following — would be converted to direct messages in Twitter, and those that are not would be forwarded to his external email address.

While there are technical challenges to this — stripping out the extraneous crap in emails, mostly — this avoids having to build the equivalent of a full email service within Twitter’s direct messsaging service.

Also note that this means anyone’s email tool can be a twitter client. Imagine if you direct all Twitter traffic to Gmail, for example, and set up a filter there so all twitter emails were automatically labeled ‘twitter’. All your Twitter messages could be indexed and searchable within — in Mr Boffin’s case — Gmail. So, Mr Boffin could create an email message — “Good morning Santa Monica!” and email it to his Twitter account, and see the responses of his friends a few minutes later, in his Gmail account.

Even if you only used the email integration for direct messages — which shared the closed and private attributes with email — it would still be worth $5/mo to me, and others who receive lots of direct messages, like Scoble.