The simple answer to this is:
- I find them inconvenient and wish they were spooled into my email, but
- even if they were, I get more email than I can handle.
I used to have a bookmark folder spring-loaded for various sites, but time continues to oppress me. So regrettably, barring the running pseudo-joke of needing clones, this is why I'm not more attentive to Twitter direct messages, Flickr mail, FaceBook messages, and so and soforth. I state this wherever I'm allowed space, and apologize if you expected a reply but didn't get one — let me know if I've missed a place I can clarify this.
The surest way to ensure I'll read your message is my About & Contact page.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Ah yes, Torley, I can understand your pain! I have the same problem myself. Being registered on at least 250 "social networking" sites, how do I keep up to date with all the messaging going on there in the background? The short answer is, I don't. The very few that actually send the messages by email (Twitter being a good example) just clutter my mailbox…
It's a dilemma. Until Google Wave launches, I'm sure I'll be missing "important messages" from a lot of people…
I hope I haven't missed any of yours!!!
Cheers,
– Gwyn
@Gwyn(gwyngwyn) And you point to something else, where services CAN send messages to your email but… you can't reply to them, or they're formatted in such an unwieldy way, etc. I'm very interested in Google Wave too. Amidst so many doesn't-add-anything innovators, it looks like a FRESH approach to multiple problems.
Google Wave is spectacular (I have developer sandbox access) but, having used it, I can tell you it's much better as a collabration tool once you already know you're interested in the topic of a wave than a one-to-one messaging system with Internet scope.
Of course, Google may have A Plan about how to improve on that; possibly a deep linking to the GMail/GDocs infrastructure. We shall see.
Torley: If your email is already out of control, why would you centralize your flows any further? I know you're a deep MacFanBoi, but consider GMail; it has many tools that may help you.
@Maggie I heart Gmail (on Mac by way of MailPlane) and my email's at a "fairly" manageable level. Good idea there!
Would be fun if all websites' built-in message systems interfaced with an XMPP gateway.
Then we could just toss messages around the net from flickr to facebook, or from Pidgin/gTalk to flickr/facebook.
… wait for Google Wave! (yes, Marv, it uses XMPP — what else?
)
LOL sorry. I'm definitely waiting for it to get rid of the trillion websites I'm registered to
I'd hazard a guess that how they're using the XMPP protocol isn't immediately compatible with Pidgin ? (operational transactions and what have you)
Gwyn, are you on the Wave dev sandbox?
I wouldn't expect Wave to get trid of website, I would expect it to start showing up on them.
A Wave can be embedded in a website. In fact it can be embedded in several websites at once.
Take a look at http://www.buildcontext.com/blog/2009/06/03/embedding-my-first-google-wave-into-wordpress/