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 in 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!
