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Twitter for email

toastio.com

16 pointsxyclos28 comments

Like some of the other commenters, I remain a bit perplexed by this. I realize we all live busy lives, but the idea of long form communication going the way of the dodo seems counterintuitive to me. There will always be a need for someone to send me a message longer than 350 characters periodically. I don't understand how this actually changes that need.

I'm also not so much a fan of the fact that this service will auto respond to people saying they should send a shorter email. That's kind of... jerk-like to be honest. I can see how it would be desirable to someone who just gets too much email, but I would posit that the better solution is to reduce the amount of email you're receiving or exercise more aggressive filtering.

You can still receive long form emails as you always have, I think Toastio is just offering another option that's more appropriate for day-to-day routine communication.

I'd imagine auto-respond being an optional feature as well so you don't have to feel like a jerk if you don't want to. However, I'm not certain about this but it only seems natural.

>You can still receive long form emails as you always have, I think Toastio is just offering another option that's more appropriate for day-to-day routine communication.

How's that any better than getting your regular emails kept under 350 words (and retaining all the interoperabillity and tons of tools and support that email has)?

It's not like most people are emailing essays to my inbox.

Or that even if someone does, I cannot just skip his email or read just enough to get his point.

I don't think it's intent is to replace email but to supplement it with a new feature. Maybe one day the feature can become one of the tools you mention that regular email already has.

>I don't understand how this actually changes that need.

It doesn't.

It's a literal example of the cliche of the entrepreneur building the "X for Y". They substituted X for Twitter and Y for email, real needs or relevancy be damned. They even boast of it on their landing page: "Toastio is like Twitter for email".

>I'm also not so much a fan of the fact that this service will auto respond to people saying they should send a shorter email.

That's just an added stroke of genius.

>I'm also not so much a fan of the fact that this service will auto respond to people saying they should send a shorter email. That's kind of... jerk-like to be honest.

It's probably both a form of advertising and an attempt to grow their market through social pressure. By 'suggesting' people format their emails in such a way as to make them receptive to using the service and insinuating that doing something besides signing up for toastio is an insult (and oh hey... here's a handy signup link right here...) and a waste of your precious time.

Of course, you could simply not write long emails, or quickly scan through the emails you get, or any number of things which don't require a third party startup, but that's not the point.

First, you fabricate the disease, then you sell the cure.

I literally can't think of a single reason why I'd use this... Maybe it's the Next Big Thing but what's the target market?

* Who is the customer?

* What is the pain point?

* How do you make money?

The target market is presumably people who receive upwards of hundreds of emails a day, most of which are pretty short or could be short with no information loss.

I don't get that much email, but I've heard coworkers complain about coming back from a short business trip to find 450 unread emails.

I guess the idea would be to make this the default method of email, only resorting to classic email when you absolutely have to break the character limit.

What scares me is what happens if you're having a back-and-forth email thread, and then it reaches a point where you simply cannot fit your next reply into the character limit? You'd be forced to completely disrupt the conversation to move it elsewhere.

>What scares me is what happens if you're having a back-and-forth email thread, and then it reaches a point where you simply cannot fit your next reply into the character limit? You'd be forced to completely disrupt the conversation to move it elsewhere.

I think you're overthiking it.

It's just an ill-thought "copy X service to Y domain" idea, with not many chances of going anywhere.

I mean "the idea would be to make this the default method of email". As if that will happen.

These are definitely key questions any new business needs to consider. While I don't know what the answer is for Toastio, maybe someone could shed light on what the answers may have been for early versions of twitter as it's somewhat related and could maybe help Toastio to address their own issues.

>Who is the customer?

VCs investing in the company.

>What is the pain point?

The inability to come up with a valid product people want.

>How do you make money?

VC money pay the salaries for a while.

> all emails are shown in your feed with no need to open threads to read or reply.

Do people just sit and read email all day, surely you then have to "action" them at the very least? In which case you then have to go merrily scrolling back up to see which ones you missed whilst you weren't intently staring at your news feed of emails.

I'd be interested to know who the devs are targetting here? Is there a certain business area?

You mention on your site that you pull from my existing email accounts. What happens to existing messages that exceed 350 characters?

I think there's some good ideas here, overshadowed by the the 350 character limit. A scannable truncated feed of all your emails is worth considering, and that's what they should be pitching.

The passive aggressive auto-responder is a massively bad idea though. Between clients, VIPs, and dear family members, I imagine the number of fuck you's sent to important people would massively outweigh the benefits of automated snark.

Let's also not forget that some companies have ridiculous email signature policies. Ours is fairly sane and I'm still looking at over 100 characters.

Who on earth would ever want to limit characters in an email. Am I missing some subtle lampooning in the copy that explains this things existence?

Who on earth would ever want to limit characters on a blog. Oh, wait..

No one forces you to read blogs.

Twitter is not a blog, and tweets are not blog posts. If you were reffering to that.

That said, sure, many people would want to limit characters on a blog. But it's THEIR choice to do so (e.g keep a laconic tumblr style blog), not something forced upon them by the people they communicate with.

And a blog is not a platform for collaboration. Often it's not even open for discussion (close comments etc).

Each blog is its own universe, and you can eithe read it or not.

Emails, we get from tons of places, including people we don't work with directly or are not our close friends, and we cannot just shove "keep it short" to them.

If your Ph.D advisor or an interested VC sends you an email, would you like for him to get a "keep it under 350 words" autoreply? Or do you want your depressed friend, who wrote a 5-page email to explain his fears to you, to get that?

I don't limit characters, but I do limit my emails to 3 sentences per http://three.sentenc.es/

It's proven quite useful in my work, so I can see this product as a useful extension of the idea.

That said, the constraint is self-imposed, and I wouldn't dream of obligating other people to do the same just to send me an email.

After seeing that there was also two., four. and five.sentenc.es I wondered if the site just had an auto page generator based on the subdomain.

Alas neither fifty.sentenc.es or life.sentenc.es worked.

I was disappointed.

This is as good an idea as a Jump to Conclusions mat.

Was Office Space shown on a major network last night? That's the second reference in as many posts.

It made a million dollars!

Why would they name it toastio and not own the toast.io domain? That seems like they're trying to be hipster but missing the point.

Screenshots, even showing fragments of the concepts, would be helpful. The idea seems a little odd and not something I could see myself using, but I still want to see how it might look.

Isn't this exactly what ShortMail was? https://shortmail.com/ (only less characters)

I'm not sure how this is different than https://shortmail.com/.

Late April fools joke?

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