Look, I think Twitter is great. I use it all the time, and without question it brings me business, sends me great information, helps me build friendships and relationships. I’m a fan.

But there are some shortcomings to trying to do business in Twitter Direct Messages (DMs), and I think they’re important to consider. I’ve noticed a lot of folks in my stream trying to swap them out for email, and it just doesn’t work as well, at least for me.  I’ll be curious to hear your take. Here’s why:

DMs can get consumed by the stream.

DMs are linear, and if you use a client of some kind (like mine, Seesmic Desktop), the ones on the bottom of the pile just get shoved off the screen. In fact, API call limitations sometimes mean that a DM might never get put into the client at all. If you choose to turn off email notifications for volume’s sake like I do, you don’t get notified of new ones, and even if you do, you have to get into your Twitter client to respond. When you’re mobile? Even worse.

In addition, they’re not threaded, which means that your DMs are interspersed with all the other ones that arrive in the same period, potentially fracturing our conversation even further. And with the volume of junk-clicking DM spam that continues to happen, your message can very easily get lost in the fray.

DMs aren’t annotated, and they don’t wait for you.

Related to the above, DMs don’t easily hang out in an inbox that’s easy to sort or search later. You can’t set up rules or filters or priorities. In order to really take advantage of them and be responsive,  you need to be in front of your Twitter stream as they come in. Otherwise, they’re really easy to lose and forget. This to me is probably the most critical reason why they don’t work well for business dealings that take more than one ping to get done.

DMs are hard to share.

It’s cumbersome to forward a DM string (though some of the mobile clients like Tweetie 2 do it pretty well). You can’t add on, copy, or append other people to the string that might need to be in on the conversation at some point. DMs are definitively one to one, and while that’s great for some things, it’s not so great for others.

You can’t organize or archive DMs, or easily save the information they contain.

Most of us need some way of sorting or organizing the messages we receive in order to act on them. At the very least, it’s ideal to be able to keep or somehow store the information contained in them without taking a pile of extra steps. You can’t do that easily with a DM, and alongside the point above, if you send me your phone number in a DM, I can’t search for it or easily find it if it’s been buried from three days ago.

Some conversations just can’t be conducted effectively in 140 characters.

I’m all for concise, but it’s really hard for me to answer questions comprehensively or provide solid information through a DM. It’s equally hard for me to receive same. And if there’s lots of back and forth or discussion necessary to work something out, 140 character bursts just aren’t sufficient. It’s way too easy to misinterpret tone, abbreviations, or leave critical information out trying to cram it into a character limit.

So, what are they good for?

Direct Messages can be great as a nudge, a heads up, quick call for help, or a door to exchanging contact information like a phone number or email to move the conversation somewhere more elastic. They’re a good short burst private conversation mechanism if you know the other person is on  Twitter at that given moment. They can be a good hello and get acquainted vehicle in a casual, personal way (not a crappy automated one).

But overall, email to me is a much more consistent and universally adopted form of online business communication. It’s been through its paces and has a level of functional maturity and reliability that just isn’t matched by messaging in other platforms (even Facebook or LinkedIn mail, though those are a bit better than DMs).

Not everyone uses Twitter the same way (if at all), and you can’t assume that everyone makes it work the way you do. It’s not consistent enough yet, and it doesn’t work its way into other business functions or applications very well.

The way I use it and the way it’s built, DMs aren’t an effective and robust enough form of communication to conduct meaty pieces of business. Not yet (and maybe not ever). Your mileage might vary, of course, but I’m going to keep pushing the people I work with not to rely on them as a main communication hub.

How about you? What’s been your experience, and how are DMs working for you as a communication tool? Let us hear it.

image by Pink Sherbet Photography
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