Surely you’ve seen this: I got one of those emails. As far as I’m concerned it’s spam and I’ll be disabling it.It is not
- Timely – what good is a summary of last week’s tweets?
- Revelant – I don’t see any evidence that it tracks the topics I care about. And, of course, if I did care about a topic, I’d be tracking it on Twitter via search, in my RSS feed reader, via search engines, on email lists and even in face-to-face meetings.
- Personal – It’s a damn email autoresponder, fercryingoutloud! Sure, it knows my name and Twitter handle, just like every other email autoresponder I’ve ever joined.
I think this is a giant leap backwards for Twitter. Email marketing represents everything a lot of us hate about the Internet. It’s annoying and for the most part a waste of the senders’ time as well as the receivers. I’m on probably a dozen or two email lists / Google Groups relevant to my interests. But I rarely give out my email address any more to, say, download a “free white paper” or some other “content marketing” gizmo.
Twitter has an email list of hundreds of millions of addresses. How long do you suppose it will take phishers to copy the emails, hook up databases of Twitter handles and email addresses and start pumping out fake “best of Twitter” emails? How long do you suppose it will be before advertisers want “Promoted Stories” sent out to this mailing list? And if you’re using GMail to read these emails, well, Google is making advertising dollars on Twitter’s back! What’s up with that?
I haven’t seen many complaints about this so far in the tech blogs. I think the focus is on Facebook’s IPO and Yahoo’s attempting to fire its way to growth. But I think it’s a bad idea, and I’ve unsubscribed.
If I were working at Twitter, I’d go the exact opposite way. Instead of building a “weekly news magazine”, I’d build a breaking real-time world news ticker. Give me a page with a map of the world. Capture an average of tweet rates by geotag, time of day and day of the week in a database. When the tweet rate takes a sharp increase at a location, light it up on the map and give me a link to search for the tweets.
