These email notifications from Klout get a big, fat FAIL in my book:
I should NEVER be REQUIRED to go back to your website to get notifications about your service.
You have already interrupted my life by sending me an email. Now you want me to further interrupt my life to go to your website to see whatever brilliant piece of information you want to share with me?
FAIL
This is a classic mistake by new services. They want to get people to come back to their website. Once users go to their website, the service can then track the users’ usage and also try to entice them to go into other areas of the service.
It may work for some services… but for many others it just services to piss off users. They may just ignore your email messages and your services… they may mark your email as “spam”… or they may write cranky blog posts like this one.
Here is a request to all the zillion new social services out there:
RESPECT MY TIME!
If you want me to use your service… and more importantly, if you want me to be a happy user of your service and promote it to other people, then follow this one simple step:
RESPECT MY TIME!
Send me a notification email WITH THE MESSAGE INCLUDED.
Facebook does this.
Twitter does this.
Google+ does this.
LinkedIn does this. (although I seem to recall they didn’t at first, but that was years ago)
Every service should do this.
Don’t make me go back to your website.
Respect my time.
Maybe I’ll use your service more…. maybe I’ll click back to your web site and respond or take other action. And yes, it might be a little less trackable… but you’ll have happier users. (And people like me won’t write cranky blog posts like this one. 🙂 )
Agreed.
This is what I call the “mirror problem”: the developers look into the mirror to design their service, instead of looking out the window at their users.
Another fail is when a blog owner screens comments, but his blog doesn’t say so, leaving the commenters puzzled and confused.
Well spoken. At least your’re getting a notification that something has happened. There is a social networking site here in Germany (werkenntwen.de) that explicitly does *not* send you any notification about new messages – you have to log into the site and check your inbox frequently (as they discard anything older than 30 days automatically). This one is next on my list of sites I’ll abandon.
Ha! Actually, I’m NOT screening comments on the blog. I *am* using TypePad’s anti-blog-comment-spam service, and that may have introduced a delay. 🙂
Lenz – yes, I think I, too, would abandon that service!