If you are a Twitter addict and have been following Twitter’s growth over the last couple years, you will probably agree with me that Twitter could replace e-mail in the year 2015 for short messages.  We would still use e-mail in year 2015, just for sending large files or something that’s highly classified.

For everything else, Twitter provides an efficient way for you to communicate with another human being.

How?

As Twitter grows, (exponentially) we will start seeing more and more people preferring their “tweets” over e-mail.  E-mail has been bombarded with spam, vacation messages, and ultimately, people who still rely on e-mail are slower than us Twitters who can get the message across the world super fast.

Think of it this way, how would you like to type everything including the To/CC field without clicking your mouse to change between text fields?

You can with Twitter…already.

The Twitter communication system is great because there’s no spam filters to filter your messages while you have a clear choice to unfollow anyone you don’t want to follow.

Twitter’s Follow/Follower System

Twitter’s follow/followers system is also another advantage over e-mail, people have a “simple” choice of simply unfollowing you if they don’t want to listen to you.   In contrast, e-mail is more complex and every publisher provides their own way of subscribing to an e-mail opt-in list.  Sometimes, you can’t even unsubscribe from spammers and even though GMail’s spam filter works great, it’s not going to stop every spam.

Twitter’s follow/unfollow method is simple and anyone who can read English can easily “unsubscribe” from any conversations they don’t want to participate in.

Hurdle Twitter Must Overcome

Twitter has been known to overload and give the infamous fail-whale screen to users when Twitter’s servers are overloaded.  As exponentially they have been growing this year (at the pace of 2X per month), it’s  inevitable but the Twitter team must get foresee the future growth and simply place more servers in their load-balanced system.

Twitter failure for service is the only hurdle they must overcome if they want to replace e-mail in year 2015.  Twitter must be reliable and fast, otherwise it will just become a great service that goes down often.  My ideal rate of uptime is at least around 98% and no more fail whales please.

Of course, you do have options of using faster client-based Twitting apps like Twhirl or TweetDeck, but the web version should always be the fastest just in case  the user is on a public computer.

It’s simply a big pain to use a system that fails to provide 24/7 stable service and I am sure the Twitter team is working hard on that, we hope it will all be fixed yesterday.

Well, this is all “my” recent discovery and theory that Twitter could possibly replace e-mail in year 2015 or even earlier.

I welcome any helpful additions/tips at the comments line and next time I will talk about how Twitter could replace “search” and possible rival Google.

I will be going to Disneyland tomorrow so please tweet me @zedomaxbiz if you have suggestions for a future post.  I will be live blogging/twittering from our corporate van equipped with netbooks and broadband USBs. addict, cc field, communication system, conversations, hurdle, pace, sending large files, short messages, spam filter, spam filters, tweets, Twitter, Twitter, whale

Tags: addict, cc field, communication system, conversations, hurdle, pace, sending large files, short messages, spam filter, spam filters, tweets, Twitter, whale

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 12:38 am and is filed under Twitter.