Telegraph
January 1st, 2009
With the disappearance of the telegraph an important and convenient medium of communication vanished. Although emails today are fast and readily accessible, they come with certain expectations. These expectations can be seen from the toolbar of most email clients which often include: New, Reply, Forwards, Spam and etc&.. Are all of these actions (or features) really necessary for a correspondence.
In my experience I often find myself in situations where I desire to receive messages, but not be prompted for an action. I wish to be given the closest thing to a telegram: a message in a medium which can be quickly discarded or folded into my pocket to be acted upon later. This passive method of receiving messages is quite possibly extinct from the information age where even twitter expects a response or another half thought out 140 character blurb of meaninglessness.
Telegraph was an experimental project that attempted to create such a medium of communication where speed and convenience were the focus of the user experience. In accordance to telegrams a certain amount of privacy is eliminated that is because to make the receiving of email faster one should not have to be bothered with logins (specially when having multiple accounts). For that reason once the user has logged in to the Telegraph site he or she will no longer be prompted for authentication on that device. This clearly insecure method is to insure speed, and for any one who desires security should opt for safer full fledged email clients instead.
Upon entering Telegraph, there are no folders or tags but only the “messages” that have been received and have been marked not read. With a click one is reading the latest messages without fear that a message will compulsorily prompt the user to respond to it thus diverging the user for the actual task at hand. Any response has to be done on a different, traditional, email client. Once the message is read it is automatically “tossed” away, that is, marked as read thereby removing it from appearing on Telegraph again. The user does have the option of storing it in their wallet for later reference, however even there after a certain fixed amount of time it is automatically removed from it as well.
As it can be seen Telegraph is not a program for doing one’s traditional email reading but rather a simple method of receiving messages while on the go. The user is offered a streamlined experience to getting messages without hesitation or apprehension that a message will require a response since after all that would require a different program. The limitation forces the user to stick to a previously thought out plan and accomplish the plan as quickly and easily as possible.