Email sent from a desk does not equal email sent from a mobile device.
When you send an SMS text or chat message people understand the casual, quick nature of the medium, and therefore expect a level of casualness when it comes to spelling full words (u versus you, ppl versus people) and forming complete thoughts and sentences. Just as spoken language is conversational, chat and SMS afford a certain level of laxness.
Email has evolved. There was a time when typing in all lowercase (hopefully you never typed in all caps) was normal enough for email. But since it has become the mainstay of corporate communication, it has dressed up accordingly. Although emoticons occasionally find their way into corporate emails, cute misspellings and abbreviations don’t.
New etiquette is needfully emerging. How do recipients know you’re sending an email from a device versus your desktop? When I’m writing a note via email from a mobile device, to a work colleague, must I type in complete thoughts and sentences? Must I capitalize and punctuate?
When I first saw Apple’s “Sent from my iPhone” default signature I thought it just let me show off my cool quotient with an iPhone reference. What they really did was create a disclaimer: forgive the typos and the informality.
(I thought about actually posting this from my phone, but blogging requires a certain level of formality that I wasn’t prepared to take on with a mobile device. That would be more appropriate for my microblog.)
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Today at the EuroIA Summit, Barcelona, we will discuss insights from the Punchcut-funded mobile social networking study.
The poster lists the chief insights and provides a visualization of the users ages and their behaviors (text messaging, IM, email, photo sharing, blogging, commenting both using desktop apps and mobile devices).
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Fiona Carswell, a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, has the answer to your text message doldrums.
“CELL STICKIES: For people who go to great lengths to see what they want to see, Cell Stickies is a small booklet of translucent sheets with comforting messages printed on them. Not satisfied with the text message you received? Peel off a Cell Sticky and slap it on your cellphone screen, showing you the message you really wanted to see.”
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This is a real text message from Cingular. (I’m sure my phone is in their database from last season when my daughters voted for Ms. McPhee.)
But, I couldn’t believe this jumble of text. I have no doubt 16 year olds could probably understand it… but I question whether that still makes it smart marketing. Does bad language and incoherent punctuation add street cred? Do they do it because they believe users won’t scroll?
The haphazard punctuation — sometimes a comma, sometimes a period, sometimes nothing — is the icing on the cupcake. Why push the boundaries of language this far into the downright ludicrous? Are they trying to cut character count to save on data transfers? I don’t get it.
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