Retweet vs email forward

Awhile ago, Anil Dash (http://twitter.com/anildash) tweeted..

"It's an interesting accident of history that we consider sharing tweets "retweeting" instead of "forwarding", like in email. RT = FWD?"

This annoyed me on two levels:

• It made me think
• I disagreed, but couldn't pin down why

Upon further reflection (to the degree I can execute that) I still do not think they are the same thing. Why? Well, best I can come up with so far is:

• There is a stronger validation with a retweet than a forward
• My email address book and Twitter follower lists are not identical, and there is a reason for that
• The act of retweeting is more public - those beyond my lists (followers or email) can be exposed to the content I resurface
  

Email data points

After getting to update data on 79 of the 312 homes in our subdivision (I am the homeowners' association's web/email/newsletter/database guy), thought I would share some insights on our small slice of the world...

- 86% of the homeowners provided an email address
- 50% wrote them so I could read them
- Gmail and Yahoo are the most popular web mail addresses. Live & msn are barely present
- AOL is the Jason of email. Several still out there and they just don't die

And for the gang trumpeting the death of blogs (hope not) and email (I wish); while Twitter is cool and along with Facebook gets first attention from me when I am online - pretty darn sure I am going to need to count on emails verses tweets to engage the gang online for some time.

Is e-mail dead?

Not according to this article.

Seems to me the "big three" in asynchronous text communications are e-mail, texting, and IM. Also seems like IM and texting get more of a volume pass than e-mail - tons of IMs just don't carry the stress factor of an inbox with 100 unread messages. Also seems like you are held less accountable to responding to texting and IMs - a good thing since all of these comminication buckets are overflowing.

Of course any long standing readers of this blog are aware that the solution to all e-mail problems has already been provided.

I guess at the end of the day, it will come down to where is the most reasonable place to find person "B" in "A" to "B" conversations, for me that is seem my e-mail inbox.

For now.

Fixing e-mail

Nice idea on addressing e-mail overload. Gee, I wonder if there is even a better way.

Well, so much for my Capt. EO spreadsheet :(

Surprisingly, e-mail is not an ideal tool to render in a "second life-y" way.

Maybe they should have tried implementing virtual email in a virtual world via a virtual console.

For your reading pleasure

Clearly, FierceCIO would only publish material from insightful individuals.

Well, usually.

Today they were willing to include Jeff Grimshaw and me.

http://www.fiercecio.com/node/3760/#part2