I can’t stand the phrase “do(ing) email.” It drives me borderline nuts (for admittedly no good reason).

It occurred to me tonight, while waiting impatiently at Fedex, that lots of communications tools use awful verbiage–actually, awful verbage, if only that was a word, since the offending terms are nearly always verbs.

“Do email.” “Make calls.” Ick!

One that seems to avoid the train wreck is IM’s, where we “chat.” Oh, maybe if we get the noun out of the sentence we can make some headway.

When we search we “Google.” Everyone likes that!

Of course we can “email,” or “call,” but I think those have already been spoiled (1) because of tradition (2) because they’re somewhat uniquely communications mediums that people try to pass off as real time commitments. “Can’t talk right now. I’m doing email.” Oh, sounds official.

I want someone to come along and introduce the “Google” (v.) of email. I don’t care so much about phone calls–I’m already brainwashed to not really mind when people “make” calls–but if you want to fix that one too, be my guest.

First, social media gurus/ninjas/consultants/etc are full of shit. I am not going to profess to be one.

One of the most common nuggets of crap I hear when people talk about using social media–especially companies using social media–is that you have to use every aspect of the service possible or you might as well not using it at all. This is retarded.

There’s nothing divinely right about any given service’s design that means that you need to use every feature they offer. If you run a corporate blog, you should probably enable comments, although not necessarily. It’s probably a good idea to have a blogroll or some kind of link group, but it’s not a game breaker if you don’t. It doesn’t really matter much if you install and wizbang plugin, but most of them won’t hurt. There’s nothing plutonic about any of these things though. Certainly none of them are worth investing in simply because the software you chose to use allows them.

On Twitter, it’s probably a good idea to reply to follow other users, but it’s plenty easy to get lots of value out of the service without doing that. There are even more proof points of this than you’d think, because many of the accounts that “follow” lots of users don’t actually follow anyone, in that they don’t pay attention to the incoming streams. That’s fine if that’s your strategy. It’s not what I’d recommend, in an ideal world, but who cares?

There’s nothing wrong with only using select features of a social media service just like there’s nothing wrong with only using select features of your word processor–except tables, for the love of God please use tables if you’re laying out anything that is remotely grid-like.

If Twitter (or WordPress or Digg or whatever) removes a feature tomorrow, were the people using it idiots or the people avoiding it geniuses? Nope.

Being hurried and being busy.

For some reason these two (totally different) things have become irrevocably associated. It bugs me to no end and not just for reasons of etymology.