Less Post More GET

So the twitter changed their notification emails for when someone follows you. And they are definitely an improvement over the old notifications.

But they are broken.

I’ve read several articles talking about the “richer, HTML version” of the email. Richer? What year is it?  Formatting doesn’t make something “rich”, data does.

Data is rich, markup is lame.

The twitter got it right by adding more data about followers and updates, but HTML? Who cares.

The email still fails to include the person’s bio and their location. And what about maybe the last few tweets at the bottom of the email? They should give me more data, not less. There simply is no reason to not include the basic profile information about the new follower. It isn’t an overwhelming amount of data – include it twitter, please.

But this isn’t why the new twitter notification emails are broken.

The new emails are sent to my profile name. That’s it.

The new notification email is broken because it doesn’t include my twitter account name.

So now, the notifications say “Hi Philip Crawford”, when they used to say “Hi Philip Crawford (wiscoDude)” – or InboxFox or one of my other accounts.

Old style new follower email with almost no information

The improved new follower email with more information

I’m guessing most people have only one twitter account. I don’t. I have multiple twitter accounts because I have multiple “personalities” (I’m sure someone will snicker about that).

I have a twitter account for my email marketing company (@inboxfox), my programming persona (@philip_crawford) and my personal account (@wiscoDude). I keep them separate because I tweet about completely different things for all three. I don’t think my email marketing people want to hear about my drinking escapades or my morel hunting. And I know for a fact my personal friends don’t want to hear about the latest in email marketing reports. I’ve actually unfollowed some people in a subject domain because they tweeted too many times about their personal life – that isn’t why I follow them.

And this points out a current problem with the twitter. Multiple “personas” are not possible to implement with one account. I don’t think that is a huge problem and if I were Biz, I certainly wouldn’t be worried about it, but the email notifications don’t take this into account.

So there you have it. Twitter simply needs to include my twitter id in the email.

And follower bio, location, latest tweets….why are they skimping on text in this email?

As my friend Preston (@gl33p) pointed out, maybe this is simply opportunity for someone else to provide a service that Twitter has chosen not to provide.