Comments on: I Want SMS to be the New Email

By: Marie

Marie — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:30:13 +0000

I don’t have any answers, but I love that you took a great stab at defining both appeal + limitations. I’ve tried explaining Twitter to RL friends, and it doesn’t make sense to them.

I’ve found that with those (long-distance) friends that I have multiple connections with, I use twitter for every day hellos, facebook or other for playful interaction (poking, playing games, etc), blogs for general information, and email for longer, more involved conversations. For local friends, I have to add the occasional lunch or event to keep it a high-quality connection. The phone is only rarely used any more; it’s almost all face to face or virtual. Email now fills the previous role of long letters for me, but I often ignore most of the eti points you mention! Oh well.

But if I were getting my email by phone, I dunno. I wouldn’t want to be *that* accessible or have one more distraction. Younger users may differ. I like the idea of cueing for shorter messages, though, which is one thing I like about twitter The congress.org site has an instant feedback tool like that on its letter-writing page, explaining that letters under a certain word count are more effective. When you get over a certain word count, the green bar starts going yellow, orange and red. Now that I can get into.

By: sarah

sarah — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:36:07 +0000

Jeremiah,

I bite my thumb at you…

sir.

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:15:47 +0000

I also sincerely regret my misuse of the letter “t” in the body of our last correspondence, which should be a “7″.
-j

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:06:47 +0000

Good day and many thanks to you, dearest Sarah of the Western shore, with whom I will have the honor and privilege of conversing throughout the duration of this text, which is to say the words following this comma here,
Ur Ru1n1nG Wr1t1nG
With most sincere thanks and many blessings from this, the Eastern shore northward of the Massachusetts Commonwealth, in health and prosperity and with the utmost respect for the discourse of written language,
Jeremiah

By: sarah

sarah — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:10:58 +0000

Tiffany — I totally agree… we need tools for uber-customization so we can control our own information flow. SMS doesn’t have it all together, either. And I do realize I’m spoiled by walking around with a QWERTY keyboard in my pocket.

Nate — I appreciate the sincere response, but I don’t appreciate you following it up with a link exchange request. That goes under the category of “spam” in my book. I can tell by this comment that you’re a real person, so KNOCK IT OFF, okay?

By: Nate Nead

Nate Nead — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:51:43 +0000

Efficient communications are the name of the game. I really think it will move in the direction your speaking someday. I’m also curious if you’re interested in doing a link exchange for SEO reasons. My google rank is 3/10 and my alexa rank is 500,000. Let me know if you’re interested.

By: tiffany

tiffany — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:09:02 +0000

“We want really short emails to show up our cell phones as text messages.”

I personally don’t :-), although I could see how that would be a cool option.

I see what you’re saying. But I think SMS has its issues too. If you don’t have a full keyboard, input is a pain in the butt. Small screens become kind of annoying after awhile.

Then there’s the immediacy / distraction element. SMS can be intrusive in a way that e-mail generally isn’t (unless you have a Blackberry) and that Twitter has the option not to be (you can turn Twitter SMS off).

I keep thinking about user experience, context, and SMS after receiving a 6am text / friend request from BrightKite

I agree, however, we all need to be much more efficient with our communications.