I hate social network messaging systems. Do you know what would be great? An autoresponder service for all of my various social networks. At the very least it would help if the emails from these services provided the content of the message as well as a real email address so you can reply directly. Regardless, I know that it’s never going to happen, because forcing you to login to their services helps inflate their pageview counts.
So my solution is to manually insert my own autoresponder text, which I’m starting to use for services like Facebook, MySpace and so on. Here’s what I have so far:
Social Network Autoresponder:
If you are trying to reach me, please use email instead. There are several very good reasons for this:
1) I would prefer to maintain just one inbox, rather than a separate one for each social network.
2) I check my email frequently, increasing the chances that you will receive an actual response from me.
3) I can reply directly to your message, instead of having to log into a separate service.
4) I will have a history or our conversation that is easily accessible and can be searched locally.
5) Social networking mail systems generally have terrible editors, I prefer to use my own mail client.
6) Email will outlive what ever social networking system that you are using to message me.
Don’t have my email address? No problem, it’s been listed on the contact page of laughingsquid.com for over a decade. When it doubt, you can always find it there.
Anything else I should add to the list? Also, please feel free to spread this idea around and use this text as a basis for your own manual autoresponder. I’ll be updating it over time and as suggestions come in.
One inbox to rule them all!
UPDATE: Ok, it looks like the autoresponder is no longer necessary. Facebook fixed the problem by including the text of the message to the emails it sends out, along with adding the sender’s email address as the reply-to. Problem solved.
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I am doing something similar, but have been hand-crafting them up until now.
5) Social networking mail systems generally have terrible editors, second only to blogs in their utter lack of usability features.
6) You won’t be unintentionally ignored when I have moved beyond the honeymoon stage with whatever the formerly hot networking system was.
Great suggestions. I’ve added a modified version of each to my list.
If you’re going to build something that smart why not have it just tease out the e-mail address of the sender and relay it to your inbox, falling back to auto-responder only on those social networks that conceal contact information from you?
(Or it can even set up a fake “e-mail” service that goes and sends your reply back through the social network …)
-danny
I attended a usability test the other week. One person, a 19 year old college student, said that he and his friends rarely use email any more. They just use myspace and facebook. I couldn’t understand that at all. I must be old.
I’m not sure of which mobile device you’ve got, but this may apply to you:
7) Reading and responding to messages from my phone is time-consuming and frustrating, so I’m much more likely to respond if you send emails.
I recently tried quitting myspace because it was annoying for the reasons already mentioned and because i get distracted by videos and psuedo hot girls eventually making me decide it’s a good time for pornin’ out.
STAGE 1:
The first thing I tried was making my profile pic a bunch of text that says “I’m quitting myspace. send me your contact info” as well as using the other bulk mail options provided by myspace (bulletins & event invites) I think I got 3 responses.
STAGE 2:
send individual messages to my friends saying:
1) I’m quitting
2) there is a better way
3) this is my contact info (email, city, phone, birthday)
4) what is your contact info so we can stay in touch?
It worked great. I didn’t keep stats, but I got a bunch more responses, some through email, some through PMs and they most contained what I requested. Followed up with emails.
This attempt was painful on my wrist. It took me like 6 clicks each to check my computer’s address book, send them messages and get a thing sent. I have 500 friends whom I actually know and I got through half of them.
STAGE 3:
my final stand was to zero my myspace inbox — Going through and sending this info request message to anyone necessary then deleting the stuff in my inbox. That was much more rewarding.
Next, to make it more difficult to contact me through myspace, I put this css rule in my profile
.contactTable, .friendsComments, .latestBlogEntry, .orangetext15 { display: none; }
I put my real world contact info big and bold on my myspace page.
RESULTS:
I know that this doesn’t make me invinsible, but I haven’t gotten a message since and if I do, I won’t give them all my reasons for emailing me, I’ll take the more proactive approach of requesting their info. That way, I fill up my hungry address book and can communicate on my terms.
yup most kids use myspace commenting and messaging or Facebook wall posts or messages to communicate. they rarely use email.
one reason is spam. why use email address when 90% of the messages are spam? social network messaging, though crude, do a better job of not allowing spam through the door… Facebook being the best.
It’s also convenient. If i’m already on a social network, the same network where all my friends are, why would i use another system to communicate with them…
it sounds to me like you’re on too many services, my friend ;)
I like your “Social Network Autoresponder”, I am going to give it a try. I found this blog post by searching for some close to “Social Network Autoresponder”. I was really hoping to find software that can help manage my online social networking.
I am curious if your example is really automated or is an elaborate copy and paste routine?