Twitter has managed to do to my email inbox what five.sentenc.es couldn’t quite accomplish.

I do not blame five.sentenc.es for its failure; at it’s core, the idea was only good if both parties signed up for the concept. Twitter, however, forces every direct message to be 140 characters or less, meaning every message is concise and to the point.

Confused? Let’s rewind for a bit.

Fighting email bankruptcy.

The big problem I’ve always had with email is that I get too much of it to process in a timely manner. The five.sentenc.es idea gave me a way of explaining my short responses, but didn’t deal with my inbox bloat: limiting responses to five sentences didn’t make incoming emails any shorter or more accurately directed.

Because of this, I now have messages in my inbox that are still awaiting a response, almost six weeks later. Even my Facebook inbox is piling up, as most of my social messages have migrated to that service instead of my regular email account.

Email and Facebook messages are great for long quasi-essays on life and all things wonderful, but are not very good at soliciting quick responses or enticing immediate action.

Twitter to the rescue.

The power of Twitter is not in the platform or the reach, but rather in its constraints. When someone sends me a direct message on Twitter, they have 140 characters with which to convey the necessary information. They can point to other places on the web with relevant background data and context, but the message itself is limited to a short snippet.

That snippet is easy to digest, but more importantly, easy to act upon. It may not contain the same information as an email (which is why email is still vital to communication) but it creates imperatives for action, a feature that is not inherent to email but needs, instead, to be explicitly created and explained.

Not everyone loves Twitter for direct messaging, but that’s because they use that messaging in a different way than I do. Scoble’s complaints about Twitter DMs are centered upon the limitations of the tool and technology without realizing that this form of messaging isn’t meant to replace email, but create new forms of actionable conversation.

All that to say one simple thing: if you need to reach me and need an immediate answer, send me a DM on Twitter. I can almost guarantee a 12-hour response window.