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How Not To Reach Me
I know that I've talked a lot on this blog about the problems I am having with email. So quite a few people have taken to messaging me on LinkedIn and Facebook. Please don't do that. I don't respond to Facebook and LinkedIn messages. Frankly I find them problematic for different reasons.
LinkedIn - there is this whole structure to a LinkedIn message that I don't like and never have. You have to allow someone to contact you. It takes time and energy. I'd rather LinkedIn just provide my email. It's on my blog after all.
Facebook - I get an email telling me there's a message waiting for me at Facebook. Why not put the message in the email and put the person's email address in the reply to field so I can reply like an email? Again, it's easier to send me an email.
I just turned off all Facebook notifications this morning and would like to do the same with LinkedIn if I can do that. As bad as email is, it seems like it works better for me than the alternatives.
Comments (14) | Posted July 23, 2007 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
The best way to reach you is to comment (hopefully intelligently) on your blog regularly enough (with your real name) that when you finally get email from a person you recognize the name.
It's that whole community/trust thing.
Posted by: Erik Schwartz | Jul 23, 2007 8:07:30 AM
Hallelujah to that -- the Facebook message thing is one of my biggest peeves. Broken email messaging designed to drive more site traffic. A page straight from MySpace's decidedly Web 1.0 book.
Posted by: Kyle Bunch | Jul 23, 2007 8:35:32 AM
I agree with Erik. Getting that email from you about a comment I left here just feels more personal. Makes me want to come back and leave more comments and build my relationship with you.
You don't need a social network to do that and the confirmations and moving from one hot buzz service to another and add those same friends again and again. Just type avc.blogs.com, I leave a few comments that you think are interesting and I am your friend.
Your social network is your blog. All these widgets are your "facebook" applications.
I understand it might seem like a step backward but I think it is necessary to maintain your sanity.
Posted by: Mo | Jul 23, 2007 8:44:08 AM
You can get around the LinkedIn gripe by simply publishing your email address on your profile page.
People will immediately understand that you welcome direct contact and will skip the LinkedIn system all together.
Posted by: Fortino | Jul 23, 2007 10:12:11 AM
You're absolutely right and it's been something that's been bothering me for quite some time as well. Being a message junkie though, I don't know if I'll be cutting those two forms of communications off quite yet. Then again, I'm probably not being flooded with emails like you are so it's more manageable for me. :-)
Posted by: Ara Pehlivanian | Jul 23, 2007 11:17:13 AM
I have actually had this dicussion before with a friend who has come out with a niche social networking site. The idea that the any social network service is going to improve the basic idea of email is just plain dumb. The network should integrate a proven system like email rather than create a parallel system. Your site will get plenty of traffic if it's good and useful to the users. Users don't need a new messaging system to keep track of...
Posted by: SteveK | Jul 23, 2007 11:23:00 AM
You've probably already found this, but:
If you are getting "InMail" from LinkedIn, it looks like you can refuse it by editing the Contact Settings section of your profile and selecting "I'll accept only Introductions" and "Do not notify me via email."
There's also a box for "advice to users considering contacting you" where you could publish an email.
Posted by: Timothy | Jul 23, 2007 11:33:29 AM
You want to rely on the tools you use most of all and generally I imagine on the Internet e-mail is still the #1 tool for most people.
Services like Linkedin and Facebook try to lock you into their communications tools. It seems like they'd be much better off by figuring out how to integrate nicely with the tools people already use. I believe it will evolve to that, and they'll figure out how to make money on putting ads in e-mails...someday.
Posted by: Robert Seidman | Jul 23, 2007 11:51:34 AM
On linkedIn, I publish my email as part of my name, so it reads "Nick Davis (nick@indibusines.com)". The upside is that I get a lot of connection requests from people I have lost touch with, since they now automatically know my email address. The downside is that this practice is commonly done by people who "open network", meaning that they waste inordinate amounts of time on seeing how many connections they can get.
Honestly, would you hire anyone who has 5000+ connections, 95% of which are people they have never met? Seems like this is a person who wastes all their time scouring LinkedIn for new fake friends.
As for Facebook, it's obvious that they value that extra ad revenue more than they do the convenience of just providing the message straight in your email. Accordingly, it would take them all of 1 day to build in a feature to let you reply directly in your email and pass the message through. Almost every trouble-ticket system has this feature.
Seems like short-term page views are more important than long-term usability.
Posted by: nick davis | Jul 23, 2007 11:51:36 AM
What's that rule about every app expanding until it includes its own messaging system?
Posted by: Michael Sippey | Jul 23, 2007 1:05:14 PM
Email still rules -- and the growth of the spam industry and the anti-spam industry proves it.
Posted by: Graeme Thickins | Jul 24, 2007 8:37:29 AM
It is myopic to assume you can ignore communication streams. By joining these networks you expose yourself and only the completely self-important individual can pretend they don't exist because there's every possibility that you'll miss something (timely, significant, amusing, life-changing, or other) if you ignore them.
Posted by: Narendra | Jul 24, 2007 4:28:32 PM
This is the same reason why I hate using eVite. They could very well easily put the message in the e-mail, but they don't so they can get more traffic. Their interface is horrific at best. In all, I agree that e-mail is best. And add to that, Gmail is the best. I love their search and tag function. It saves me a great deal of time.
Posted by: Steven Loi | Jul 25, 2007 6:26:50 PM
I agree, it's so obnoxious when MySpace, Facebook, et al. try to own every last bit of message traffic.
37signals does it the right way with their Basecamp app. All messages are sent in full via email with a link back to the page with the full thread. If you ever leave Basecamp you still have an archive of everything in your inbox.
It's mighty considerate to do it the right way instead of the greedy way.
Posted by: Nathan Bowers | Jul 26, 2007 10:14:55 PM
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