Twitter = Spam... and that's a good thing

5/29/09 Update: Is Google reading this blog? Google Wave seems to be concepted along the lines of the screenshot I put in at the bottom of the post. I'm being vain, of course. But I love that it only took two weeks from when I had the thought to when a product was announced ;-)

5/14/09 Original:

A funny thing happened as Facebook passed 250M users and Twitter passed 19M... the number of email forwards I receive pretty much came to a complete and sudden halt. I seem to never receive (un)funny videos, political satire or random photos via email anymore. 

Rest assured, I still receive plenty of Spam from people (or bots) that I do not know; but that is easy to deal with in Gmail. What was harder to deal with until now was how to filter out unwanted spam from friends, family and coworkers.

And while my colleagues are racing to figure out how Twitter will deliver a (useful) real-time search application or slay the dragon that is Google, I've been thinking about how Twitter and Facebook can be useful in the workplace. I'm not the only one and I am definitely not the first one to think about this. 

The use case I find most immediately compelling is to use Twitter to replace email groups (think "all@companyx.com" or "workgroup@companyz.com). In a recent consulting arrangement at a very large advertising agency, I was using their email system. I estimate that on any given day 40% of emails were directed at a general email group (ie. no indivudal emails included in the To: or CC: fields), another 40% where I was cc'd and the last 20% directly to me. 80% of emails sent to me were not directly to me. Some examples of emails:

• "Does anyone have a sales contact at Forbes?" (resulting in 3-5 replies to all)
  
• "I have Giants tickets. First person to reply gets them." (resulting in a few replies to all and a confirmation that the tickets are not available any more)
  
• "The meeting with Google is beginning right now in the conference room."
  
• "Did you see this great new research report from the IAB?" (with some people responding with quotes from the report to show that they read it)
  
• "I just thought I'd pass along this research report from the IAB in case you missed it" (when people in different corporate circles send the same thing out and people who cross over into both circles receive it more than once)
  

Wouldn't these all be better managed via a Twitter for the enterprise? Yes and my email would be that much happier for it. This, of course, is possible right now using News Groups in Outlook or other email apps. The problem with the current approach is that the sender wants to broadcast something and get it right in front of you right now; email newsgroups/message boards are pretty passive because they are on a different screen. I think to make it work, the user should have an interface that looks like Gmail except instead of ads on the right, the Twitter feed lives there. Integrating this into email by providing the feed directly into the mail interface and restricting "send alls" seems to be the best way to gain adoption. Here is a (lame) screenshot to show what I'm talking about: