I’ve been thinking about some of the less common but still relevant use cases for short message communication. One thing that I’ve been thinking about is directed messaging to a subset of my followers.

1. I tweet “@listname This link will be really interesting to you: http://bit.ly/interestinglink”
2. This tweet only shows up in my followers who I’ve added to the list (with listname). Another option would be to either include it in the @replies section or perhaps create another section for list replies.
3. Optionally recipients of the tweet could @reply the list back although this could complicate things slightly.

The main risk I can see with this would be spam and overcomplicating the UI and user experience. Yammer does provide more directed communication but it is heavy weight and becomes complex when you have multiple groups.

I’ve several other ideas for short message communication but I’ll save them for later posts.