Shortmail is truly short at 500 characters

NEW YORK, USA: Plenty has been written about Shortmail, the "Twitter for e-mail" startup from Baltimore-based 410 Labs, but almost all of it is the usual journalism-by-press-release.

I recently had the chance to talk to Jonathan Julian, one of the developers at 410 labs, and he explained to me some of the logic of Shortmail that I had been missing.

First, a disclaimer: Shortmail is one of those things that you have to try out for a while to really grok, and it's not for everyone.

Use Case: Public-Facing E-mail

I have no idea how many people make their e-mail address available publicly, so that strangers can send them messages. But I suspect that almost every professional who wants to be reachable does. The proliferation of contact forms on the Web suggests that companies and individuals want to be reachable, but also want a way to filter out the spam.

Shortmail seems almost custom-tailored for this application. In the same way that anyone who is desperate to reach you could send you an @reply on Twitter, Shortmail provides a channel through which anyone can send you a note–but only up to 500 characters in length. It helps that your Shortmail account is by default your Twitter handle @ shormail.com.

As someone who often gets much longer notes from complete strangers, I thought at first this would be a problem. But it turns out that if someone hasn't made their case in the first 500 characters, I'm not interested anyway. And because Shortmail is a separate channel from my personal email address, it's an automatic filter for an entire class of mail: First-time connections.

Use Case: Concision

Obviously, replying to people in an environment that demands I use only 500 words is its own time saver. Shortmail provides the perfect excuse for keeping everything brief. It's the psychology of exchanging messages with an @shortmail.com account, as much as anything, that gives everyone permission to be direct.

 (Source: www.technologyreview.com)