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I'd add 1a. Sometimes the ability to even delete messages one-by-one simply disappears for a few day.
reinvention of email, but without a lot of features.
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I had started using DM as an IM client (I use Twhirl when on my computer - which feels, in many ways, like an IM app). Now I see for Twitter connections with a very large following this can be stupid and annoying.
I think in some cases DM still has value, but I'm going to be far more selective in the future.
Peter
DMs and SMS work best as a way to set up longer communication ("Call me ASAP"), so making them larger just encourages people to use them in more annoying ways. My .02.
Also I know that my daughter and her cohorts don't use traditional email so its txt, Facebook or twitter for them.
Perhaps the good folks at Twitter/ could create a way that your DM's are forwarded to your gmail account or they could give people the option to block DMs.
For me, I certainly have a limited number of DMs and with my TweetDeck it's easy to take a look. But if I were popular.....
Since I do not have a huge following
I like robdiana's suggestion: an "email user" link would be much more useful.
There are times when a private message is needed; sometimes, I have no other contact info for a person. And I certainly wouldn't want to just blurt my phone number out to Twitter and, by extension, Google (@Pistachio, that was a classic).
A select multiple and/or mass delete feature would address many of your complaints, and I've seen a number of people suggest that. I don't know why it's not an option. My solution? I just don't bother cleaning out the inbox. If Twitter servers are overloaded as a result, maybe they'll fix that problem one day, eh?
DMs are a useful way to see if someone's following you back. (@Scobelizer, I guess you don't have to worry about DMs from me! :) But it would be just as useful to have a "Following back? Yes!" message displayed on a user's profile when you land there.
And that makes DMs or Twitter bad? If someone sends you a DM when they really should call around to your home, is that another reason DMs suck?
All in all, I'm for them :)
Peace
In terms of my use of DMs, I talk to a lot of bloggers and friends this way and find it to be a good way to get in touch with folks (1) quickly and/or (2) for whom I do not have an email address.
I also appreciate you posting about this so my feelings are no longer hurt that you have never returned any DMs I have sent :P Saw you were in DC a few weeks back and I suggested some coffee or sumthin. Now I know, DM is not the way to go with you! ~ L.
My DMs come straight to my Gmail inbox where I can forward, sort, etc. at will.
What I can't do is respond to them from my email (my workaround is to remove the Twitter address and replace it with the sender's actual email address, which is kind of a pain)
If I want to respond via DM, I have to log back into Twitter and do it that way which is time consuming and often defeats the reason I've turned off Twitter in the first place (concentrating on cleaning up my email inbox)
But if Twitter DMs would act like regular email-- show up in my Gmail inbox with the ability to respond directly from email, that would be a start. Though, to your point #6, not a full-on solution.
- I'm following X but X doesn't follow me.
- X tweets about some topic to which I reply @X
- X sends a DM asking for more details
- I try DMing back to X but that is not possible (he's not following me, remember?) so I reply @X asking him to follow me so that I can reply via DM (that info was confidential n couldn't pass that on the public timeline.)
- I get another DM in return which has a smiley! Doesn't bother to follow me!
I've had not one but two such experiences from two different people. Why even send a DM asking for information when you don't want to follow that person?
It's because of this breed of Tweeps that I hate the DM feature of Twitter.
Personally I do receive and read ALL of my DM and FB message in my mail inbox as they are forwarded. Depending on the content of the message I do invest more or less time to find out how to answer.
not being able to reply in DM is a reason not to reply at all, etc.
btw @amanda - every single good email client has a decent search feature. if you rely on fb for having search, you have a whole lot of other issues.
Getting rid of DMs is not the solution. Fixing 'your' way of using DMs is. A good way to start will be to set Twitter to mail you when you get a DM. That way you can file them and read them at your own leisure. You could maybe set up a bot that could send a DM back to a user telling them to mail you instead. There are various ways to deal with it. Getting rid of the feature will mess things up for people who're use to it *and* use it sensibly.
Add to your list - auto-DMs. Follow someone and get a "thanks for following me. I like you. Here's my sales pitch" DM. Sigh.
In the 3D world, when someone goes to the toilet he misses out on the conversation that takes place while he/she is away. With twitter you have a standing record of what went on, and you can catch up.
And you don't need a piece of paper with you to write down the details of that link to a good story, or whatever.
But not everything should be said out loud to the group, particularly when there is a throng of people who are just passing by, all listening to the conversation.
So I see a use for direct messages. I don't want to say everything in public - and some things, such as "All the links on your website are old and dead - you need to look at them", are nicer said in private, so as not to embarrass someone by broadcasting them.
But the biggest reason for direct messages is that without them I haven't a hope of seeing messages intended for me unless I happen to chance upon them.
And as not everyone is in my time zone, and as I am not on twitter all the time, I am going to miss certain public messages unless I go hunting, and while I do look back over the previous hours' messages - I might easily miss a message.
One thing I would like is for Twitter to email me when someone replies to one of my direct messages, in the same way that it emails me when I receive a direct message.
I certainly see the value in everything that you're asking for, but since I don't get that many DMs this isn't a problem for me.
What should happen, is that someone should make a twitter tool that lets you do all these things and more with your DMs. Maybe a tweet deck add-on that whenever you get a DM it auto-responds that the sender should email you instead. I say "someone should" because I'm not a programmer and have no clue if such a tool is even technically possible.
Cheers!
@rafaelmarquez
First with Mail you have the ability to create multiple folders and attach rules for any email message including but not limited to who it is from, subject of email, text within the content, who it's from, and pretty much any other defining aspect of any particulars in any email message.
Second, is the ability of creating rules for folders which indicated above can be a slew of variables to direct any message to any folder based on pretty much any predetermined variable or variables which allows you to segment your email messages down to a single keyword or phrase.
I have personally created 2 rules for Twitter emails which are as follows:
1)New followers-This rule moves all messages received that contain "is now following" in the subject line of the email. I have a couple Twitter accounts so I have also added account specifics to the rule which directs the messages to their respective folder based on which account has a new follower.
2) Direct messages- This rules segments direct messages to their respective account folders I've created which allows me easy access to every direct message I've ever received.
Using this process you can do pretty much anything you would do with any other email message received.
Hope this helps take the burden away from the featureless DM section on Twitter.
Sincerely,
Joshua Needham
http://Twitter.com/iphonedevforum
2)
Now if only I could reply to that DM notification email with a < 140 character email and have it show up as a DM to the originator, letting us each use the tool that works best for us.
Now if only I could reply to that DM notification email with a < 140 character email and have it show up as a DM to the originator, letting us each use the tool that works best for us.
I am not so sure it is the system (DM) that is at fault here. I think it is more about how everyone and thier dog is trying to use twitter for so many different purposes.
All the points you make however are very agreeable and on point... but for the average user of Twitter with no where near as many followers as you DM's are a great little tool.
With so many services (facebook, friendfeed, twitter etc) that you, myself and others are subscribed to, follow and are followed at, it has almost become impossible to maintain all of these different social networks and respond to everyone. Maybe there just needs to be a better way.. do not know what it is, but there has to be one right?
Maybe one way to curve the issue is do like @garyvee does... put in your profile how to contact you and explain you will never get to DM's.
Anyway... that is my take.
- Doc
How can @ev fix DM messages?
1) EMAIL ALERTS. Anytime you receive a DM, twitter sends a copy to your email. There you can click and respond through twitter, or just hit reply and continue the conversation by email. Best of both worlds, and address all your points above...
2) DM ANYONE. Let anyone DM any other user, regardless their follow status. Twitter was one of the first platforms to break the concept of "friend", allowing asynchronous social communications between peers; why on earth DM should require synchronous connection between the two? The recipient still have the option to just ignore the message or to block the person entirely...
Also, taking the opportunity we're discussing twitter improvements, REPLIES are also broken!
3) REPLIES ANYWHERE ON TWEETS: the "@user" should be recognized as a reply anywhere on the tweet, regardless if it's on the beginning or not.
(it was like this before, but I suspect they changed to make it easier/faster to optimize the SQL queries, using standard indexing instead of full-text index)
my 2 cents.
I suppose it all boils down to the different ways people use Twitter in the first place.
I think that for most users the current DM feature is sufficient, but I'm sure we'll see some of the features requested above incorporated in the next year.
@cbell619
6, 7, and 9 don't apply to Facebook.
5. Doesn't even make sense given the 140 character limit of Twitter. Use email for that.
If you're talking about Facebook, you have some valid complaints. You're trying to use Twitter for things it was not designed for, though.
If you truly want change, it seems like the best way to get it is to offer a few solutions. I'm not sure what the best answer is here.
If one is a nobody and no power at all: one gets no direct messages and complain for the lack of interest.
We are nobody: @LEADSExplorer
AS I read your post I thought, why couldn't Twitter allow you to get direct messages wherever you want them. Forwarded to your email, or printed out and sent via carrier pigeon, if that is what you want.
One of the challenges, though, is keeping up with Twitter. I've had to update it once a month or so. Not to mention the times (like right now) where the delete functionality is disabled on DMs, which also affects the bookmarklet.
It's a hack, but it works quite well and I know several people whack a few thousand at a time much to the demise of the Twitter database...
The way it flips between sent and inbox is confusing too. And what ARE they thinking not allowing us to EASILY delete messages? That means options to delete one, many or all at once.
We also need a way to mark messages we want to answer later because the time will come when you can't answer all of them right away and then they'll fall through the cracks leading people to believe you're ignoring them.
Every system that exists would greatly benefit by recruiting power users with experience beta testing to improve their usability - ideally when they first start so they notice these "little" things that lose new users.
I am not the only one with a background in diagnosing computer issues and usability and we are not all that difficult to find. I volunteer to test any system willing to actually listen to and act on valid feedback.
My thoughts:
1) We should be able to bulk delete.
2) If I put them in folders then I would never get to them ;) So please no folders.
3) Re sort is a GOOD idea- by user by date. GREAT IDEA !
7) If someone DM's me I should be able to reply whether they follow me or not.
But DM is not email so I really wouldn't want Twitter DM to have email features.
"I can’t CC, or copy other people, or send a message to a group. Things that email has been able to do for years"
Isn't the idea of twitter simple fast communication in 140 characters or less ?
I agree if the reply needs 140 characters or more - people really don't use DM use an email. I think its an issue with the people DM'ing you though not Twitter.
Which leads me to my favorite rant - Hey PEOPLE if you want to work online in this industry list your email on your blog or website. OK rant over :)
Twitter is for simple DMs Email is for email.
then you should check out www.putiton.com
If you are tired of facebook but still want to connect with your friends then pick up the phone...
2. Actually, I do just that very thing with Gmail. I apply tags. You'll simply need to key off the content and header of the message. Please see below for a light tutorial on the items you can key off in your own filtering strategy with either server side or desktop approaches:
From envelope is of the form
twitter-dm-USERNAME=DOMAIN@postmaster.twitter.com
Where USERNAME@DOMAIN is your registered email address
Note that the "twitter-dm" is consistent with all DM's sent since the most recent changes to the email envelope.
Subject is of the form
Direct message from TWITTERNAME
Also, and more importantly, there are a significant number of X headers included of the form
X-Twitter*
Example:
X-Twittercreatedat: Fri Dec 05 16:28:15 +0000 2008
X-Twitterrecipientscreenname: [TWITTERNAME]
X-Twitterrecipientid: [NUMERICVALUE]
X-Twitteremailtype: direct_message
X-Twitterdirectmessageid: [NUMERICVALUE]
X-Twittersenderid: [NUMERICVALUE]
X-Twittersendername: [TWITTERNAME]
X-Twittersenderscreenname: [TWITTERNAME]
X-Twitterrecipientname: [TWITTERNAME]
Where [value] represents the specific item as the name implies.
Please review your headers to see what I mean.
3-10. See point 2.
11. Please don't do that.
I'll reserve calling Facebook email a steaming bucket of fail because I'm sure
a) they can fix it pretty quickly and extend upon Twitter's ideas and approach
and/or/but
b) they don't really care about the feature at all outside of its use in the Facebook silo... yet?
But you are right that the design is a little flawed that you cannot control DM in anyway.
Your #7 about DMs and following is less frustrating but equally annoying.
This is the reason that a few friends and I build a Unified Messaging Platform which makes it possible for people to access their messages/data with the interface they want, rather than being locked into mail/usenet/web/ftp/twitter/chat/etc... Sadly VCs didn't think it was so innovative in 2000 so we gave up and suffer like everybody else. Although we suffer slightly less... :)
The problems you face: No way to sort DM's
Not easy to search
Well I don't have many mails 25 odd may be. Mopst of them are not in my twitter profile as I deleted them. So where are these mails? IN my inbox of course. I get an alert everytime someone DMs me and the message is delivered to my inbox, where I tag it and archive it (gmail). When I have to search for info within those mails well gmail search's ability to search within particular tags comes handy!
Now the problem you face now is similar to the problem I have with an old email id of mine. I get only spam mails there now and they are so many in number that I get tired deleting them. What you can do ignore all the past DMs and start reading all new Dms now on. Cos I find DMs helpful. Certain things are better kept betw 2 individuals than blurted out to the whole world!
Of course you are right in that people who use them for long drawn out back and forth conversation should be shot.
But Facebook's I actually use, generally for quick personal correspondence that I don't care about archiving or finding later.
I think Facebook's works better for me for several reasons:
1) I don't approve any Facebook requests from people I don't actually know, and I try to keep my Facebook circle of friends fairly small (I have "only" 306).
2) Facebook messages come to my cell phone via SMS. Basically nothing else does except a direct SMS or tweets from a select few people I used to work with.
3) There are lots of people for whom the only e-mail address I have is a work one, and I generally prefer to send them an FB message (that until recently at least would tend to show up in their personal e-mail) instead of an actual e-mail.
Twitter is not a GTD application, it's not email, it's not complex in any way shape or form. It's a broadcast platform for 140 character text that has a point to point backchannel, however, it is a text broadcast platform first.
Adding a layer of complexity means adding another reason that my mother won't use it.
Just get the broadcasting tools (shaky cell phone cams, FriendFeed and etcc. spewers), all the essential evangelist tools needed to spread the messages, whilst never having to listen (or bother with) the actual flocks.
(Also, if I have a blog post that gets 3 replies that's a lot, so maybe I am just boring.)
My e-mail backs up way, WAY more that my Twitter DMs.
I like Twitter DM because I am always able to receive them as I am always plugged into Twitter on multiple devices and I can choose to reply in real time or later.
The people I get DM's from are almost always friends.
Steve Sloan
What I would like you to consider before flaming against DM and Twitter.
1. Why "having the ability to delete them all" has to do with read them or ignore them all? I really didn't understand this argument.
2. Folders is more for email. Twitter is not an Exchange plugin or a Blackberry feature. Plus: priority on Twitter is chronology, is WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW, so forget about twisting it or making another priority. The DM that just arrived is the priority.
3. Just what I said: Twitter is not email. Stop trying to make them match in every feature.
4. Again, you're trying to make Twitter DM feature work for your business, but that's not the main purpose of it. Twitter is not for business or conference calls or business meetings. It's not a Project Manager software.
5. Copy your boss? You're joking, right?
6. Asking a question that needs a 500c response it's the questioner's problem. And you can tell that in less 140c. You choose to become frustrated because you want it to be so. Besides, you want to make those 10 reasons, so you just invented this one. I want to tweet a 150c tweet, oh, I'm so frustrated.
7. Actually I agree on this one.
8. Do you know you can choose to be notified by email when you receive a DM, and the DM message will go in it?
9. Again and again, Twitter is not email. Plus, group feature is missing on the whole Twitter and not only in DM feature. Twimc, particularly, I don't want group messaging, it's the kind of complexity that it would start killing what I think Twitter really is. Please, don't be ICQ, Twitter. Don't be Microsoft Project either.
10. Seriously? Email, again?
The right way to build the feature is simply to offer an option: DM to Twitter account or use a Twitter form to send an e-mail (including actual reply address) directly to your Gmail (or other preferred location)
Twitter is great for many things, but the benefits of short messages, follows and DMs run into a wall in many cases, like this. My twitter network is negligible and its already impossible to parse through the messages I get on my feed in any useful way.
DMs as replacement for IM are certainly messed up. We tend to be more selective about our IM buddies, so would expect to have richer conversations on IM. So no substitute there.
DMs as replacement for email - well sometimes the context is in the DM thread so the communication should be there.
But in general DM (and the whole of Twitter) is a very weak 2-way medium. It is actually a pretty weak one-way medium since the communication space is flat. It depends on the level of intimacy one has with the tweeter (twitterer). It's like getting the Christmas letter that goes to everyone. I don't care about Uncle Albert's gout, but someone on the recipient list probably does.....
I find very rude and indecent (call it netiquette) if someone on Facebook sends me a message (and I have lot of them unread) and on my web site on several places there is 'contact' page with email. Academic people usually send email directly, the others send messages - I wonder if people read 'contact', or notifications for sending email, or they are just idle and it's easier to spam you on FB?
If anyone is interested checked it out. It's http://peekamo.com, and they always appreciate feedback and actually listen.
But also that the use or misuse of DM is annoying for people with a lot of followers. As such can appreciate some of your points and reason for request for email or open tweets. Perhaps also request a polite 'No DMs' in your bio so that new followers get the message or get reminded of this post and don't DM?
So... the No Direct Mail notices make their way from the letterbox to social media channels. DM really has had a bad rap over the years!
If I were in your shoes, I probably wouldn't like it so much.