A Suggestion Re: Time Sensitive Tweets

One of the initial promises of twitter was that it was going to crank our social lives to eleven by keeping us über-connected to our friends and potential hook-ups. In that theoretical twitter-infused world your pals would tweet:

and you would tweet back:

And all of those previously-missed moments of friendship would finally be captured and fill in those tiny bits of emptiness in your heart.

But somehow that world hasn't seem to have materialized for me. It's not that my friends don't use twitter to let me know when they are grabbing some food in my neighborhood. Many of my friends are prolific tweeters and that's the problem. I can't forward their tweets to my phone because there are just way too many but by the time I get around to checking their updates I've already missed the window on their open invite.

So I am suggesting a new nomenclature for time-sensitive tweets: the exclamation point!

And now a demonstration:

Pretty simple.

If it is widely used and adopted by twitter or at least implemented by a few smartphone apps, these urgent updates can be automatically sent to your phone via sms or send you an alert using your smart phone's alert system. This could also be implemented by facebook as well as myspace (if any of your friends are still on myspace).

Everyone's status-stream is only going to get more cluttered as adoption rates of micro-blogging increase. The exclamation point is a simple solution to have the urgent information you want sent to you in a timely manner.

! Spread the word.

Comments (10)

1. 

   By Gordon on July 21, 2009

   That’s a nice theory in concept, but you can be sure it will be abused by marketers. The only perfect solution to wanting to invite your friends somewhere is to just invite your friends somewhere.

2. 

   By Brian Fountain on July 21, 2009

   @Gordon: Thanks for the feedback. In the system I’m proposing, you would set the permissions of who can push alerts to you (similar to how you can select which tweets get sent to your phone). If it gets abused by someone you are following or you just don’t find their urgent messages useful, you would simply turn of their ‘urgent updates’ in your settings.

3. 

   By Benjamin Ragheb on July 21, 2009

   Why not a question mark instead? Every one of your examples ends in a question.

   In fact, I’d bet the number of false-positives (meaning, I didn’t want a notification) on any tweet ending in a question mark would be pretty low.

4. 

   By Brian Fountain on July 21, 2009

   @Benjamin: I considered the question mark but Microsoft Outlook has already established the “!” as a symbol for urgent or time-sensitive communication. Also, not all questions are urgent (e.g. Why do rappers love auto-tune so much?). My thought was to create something that was short and precise. But I agree that most urgent messages are conducive to being phrased as a question.

5. 

   By Howard Liptzin on July 21, 2009

   Hey Brian, you should get involved with microsyntax.org They are dedicated to solving exactly these kinds of issues by using dedicated characters so they would be machine readable.

6. 

   By Brian Fountain on July 21, 2009

   @Howard: Thanks. I certainly will.

7. 

   By Charlie Todd on July 21, 2009

   I’m still at Best Buy. Can someone give me some advice already?

8. 

   By Phil on July 21, 2009

   Use a phone instead.

9. 

   By Bob26 on October 23, 2009

   What is really happening here? ,

10. 

    By Bill Johnson on November 5, 2009

    I never would have thought of that