Socially Mundane

Article Summary:

• Email costs everyone of us if not in real dollars, in lost time 
• GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GFX, and all the rest are bloated, archaic and lethargic solutions that are becoming too complicated with too many “features” we don’t need 
• Email communication, in a social aspect is on the decline as we prefer short-message services like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, Tumblr, Posterous and the like 
• Shortmail (shortmail.com), or at least the concept of it is the real savior of the email time-wasting mess we suffer through every day

My first Internet Service Provider was NETCOM. My first email application was Claris Emailer version 1.0 on Macintosh System 7 and it was an exciting new adventure, this whole Internet thing. The World Wide Web had only been invented months ago, but this email thing has been around far longer. I had an email address. I was finally “somebody” in a clique of a fraction of a fraction of the population proper. I was on the cutting-edge riding the wave that was sure to come.

Of course no one else I knew in the world had an email address. I was alone. Spam had yet to be invented and so it was exciting when I received my very first plain text email in courier typeface. A short reply to one of the dozens of emails I’d sent out that first week, often to web sites with queries.

It was a simpler, peaceful, pithy time.

That was then and this is now: unsolicited spam, garbage, solicited spam, trojans and phishing attempts, friends passing chain-mail jokes and stupid cat pictures, oh - and then there’s “professional” email we must contend with.

But there is a real solution.

There is a major problem with email: it’s either frivolously too short (I’ll call you) or ridiculously too long (I called to say I sent an email). Rarely is it handsomely and comfortably between. The too short emails are often a massive waste of time. It’s too easy to send them so we get junk replies like “thank you” and that’s it. A wasted click. Then there are the over-verbose, language-lazy diatribes. Email is too easy to create and send willy-nilly. There is no limit in costly paper size, no costly ink involved, and no costly stamps either so we throw-in a half dozen addresses into the courtesy copy (cc) portion and press a button heaping our time-wasting wrath onto our victims.

The real problem is often the use of too many words to communicate our message, and the courtesy copies go to people who probably have no need for all that information to begin with. Time is wasted just in reviewing it all, not to mention if it’s required reading. Many of you can easily say “I don’t have that problem”. But actually you do. You just don’t realize it.

Then along came Twitter, which is actually a solution. Sort of.

Because of the hard-limit on the number of characters available in Twitter, we tend to think about, and re-think how we want to say what we want to say before clicking that “send” button. This causes us to focus on the actual message, stay on point. Twitter could be an email solution, except all messages sent default to a publicly viewable timeline. A private “Direct Message” (which is what an email really is) takes an extra click or two and unlike email, you must be in mutual contact lists (by following each other).

Oh, and 140 character hard-limit is a bit not enough to actually communicate more than a passing thought. Fail. Too bad as the concept is stunningly simple and appropriate for concise, well-thought communication.

Then some guy who calls himself Dave Troy comes up with a brilliant idea: turn Twitter into an email service. The main difference is to increase the character limit to something more reasonable and suitable for email: 500 characters instead of 140. This is just enough room to force you to foucus on your main message and only the main point of it without the chaff.

Hell, we might even break-out the Thesaurus and relearn our own language skills again.

It’s not actually Twitter as an email service, but rather a service based on Twitter paradigms and uses Twitter to help simplify things. Please indulge me here.

He calls it “Shortmail”.

A refreshing name in so many ways, not the least of which is how it clearly describes on its own what it is and what it does (which seems to be a lost art in the developer and marketing world these days).

A side benefit of a 500-character limit (in and out) is that most (if not all) unsolicited garbage is automatically quarantined. The same is true for replies and others you know who send along miles of diatribe. An automatic reply states the original message was too long. It’s a polite way of saying “look, dimwit: stay on point and trim your rhetoric down, I don’t have time for the rest.” However, you can still go through and look at those quarantined messages, just in case something important comes through (such as those “verification” messages that come from services you may have signed-up for).

How to keep it simple and encourage people to jump on-board when there already are so many other free email services vying for our attention and patronage? Easy: tell everyone they already have an account on the service. All you need do is claim it by signing into the service the first time and you’re done. Full stop. All set and ready to go.

Yes, if you have a Twitter account (whether you use it or not) you already have an email account at Shortmail.com.

Yes. You.
The person reading this right now.

Head over to the Shortmail and login with your Twitter credentials (and you are really logging into Twitter, not the Shortmail system). Once logged-in, Twitter sends a token by way of browser cookie to Shortmail and voila: you’re in. No registrations to accomplish, no personal or private information to hand-over, nothing except (for just-in-case reasons) an alternate email address in case something goes amiss and things need to be reset (which happens to default to the address registered with Twitter, but you can change it - nicely “duh”).

It feels like Shortmail is really just an extension of, or a “plug-in” to Twitter. Your Twitter identity (user @name) is your email address: username@shortmail.com. As for the “real name” that appears in the from field at the recipient’s end, that’s simple: it is your Twitter “handle” - you know, that long name you are known by and can change willy-nilly at Twitter.

One caveat: You can change Twitter usernames at will. If you do, you can log into Shortmail with your new (and original) username, however the email address will -apparently- stay with the username that was active at the time you claimed your Shortmail account, which makes sense.

Other niceties of Shortmail: there is no “delete” button. Only “archive”. So all your communication remains safe and sound for eternity. Or until email armageddon occurs and we see the end of the world as we know it.

Especially nice: conversations are organized not by subject, but by contact. And especially especially nice: thread discussions are arranged top-down: original message at the top, reply below, reply below and so on. It allows you to review the entire discussion in order - the way it should be. It always was like this in the old days: replies were added to the bottom of a message. We can thank Microsoft and their shiny new Outlook version 1.0 for changing this paradigm by placing the cursor above messages being replied to. Now it’s become irritating status quo across the entire interwebs and I personally despise it.

So why bother even going to look at Shortmail when you already have a Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, GFX, Mail.ru, and possibly a dozen other free email addresses? Because those all are clunky, bloated, sluggish and fat. You won’t notice this until you do look at Shortmail. You will instantly understand how lightweight it is. It is refreshingly fast and airy, if feels nimble like a ballerina on pointe.

But you use those others through your desktop app you say? Well Yahoo offers POP access for a fee and their IMAP is shoddy as hell, unless you’re using an iOS. Hotmail is the same way. And Gmail is a complete mess. Too many folders, too many redundant garbage just in the managing of things and way more features than we need. Can you say “bloatware”? Not to mention the tracking and privacy concerns.

I am of the opinion GMail is exactly the kind of time-waster Shortmail is trying to answer. Oh, and Shortmail offers IMAP services also, so you can use it through your desktop or iOS/Android/WebOS app or even through mobile browsers and it still feels nimble and lightweight, fast. Even on my Kindle!

But here’s the real benefit to Shortmail: you are likely already well established socially through Twitter. Troy even encourages you to publicly throw-about your Shortmail address. I have and without any spam or phishing or other “junk” coming through. Isn’t it also amazing how anyone can contact you through an email address that’s easy to figure out: Twitter username@shortmail.com. If I know your Twitter @name, I know your email address. How refreshing it that?

My Twitter username is @AriBlackthorne. Go ahead and email me. I’m willing to bet you can figure out my email address. Oh and you can import the “email address” of all your Twitter leaders. If you send them a Shortmail email and they haven’t logged-into their Shortmail account for the first time, they will receive a Tweet (an @mention, actually) that they have received an email and to go get it.

And a really cool feature obviously inspired by Twitter itself is the “public thread”. Think of it as a Twitter feed between two people, but at 500 characters a “tweet”. It’s wonderful when a heated Twitter debate starts up in your timeline, you simply tweet:

@name1 and @name2: yo, take it to #Shortmail and do your followers a favor!

A final note: though Shortmail asks to be allowed to send tweets on your behalf - they never do (except in the example above) - and in that example and the two times Shortmail asked to tweet something for me: the message was displayed with full editing control so I could change the message entirely - or even say “NO” by canceling it.

Go log into the email account you already have right now at Shortmail.com.

In email terms: Shortmail is a God-send. Socially Awesome. Literally.

It’s really KISSSS: Keep it Short, Sweet and Simple, Stupid.