I just finished reading a post on Paul Stamatiou’s blog (I had to look how to spell his name, I get it wrong every time) about how much private messages or site mail, which is what I refer to them as, sucks. I’m with him for the most part, they do suck if you get a ton of them, it’s like having another email address and most people can’t even handle one! Private messages have never been much of an issue for me in the past, most social networks I use frequently send messages to my inbox, so it’s just like getting another email.

For the most part I think private messaging systems are helpful. Especially if someone doesn’t know your email address and wants to contact you, or you don’t want someone to know your email address but you want them to contact you. Recently, through twitter, I agreed to help someone test an app they made with my new iPod touch. In return for helping him he gave me a license to his app (the app is PodWorks, and it rocks), but he didn’t have my email address so he Direct Messaged me through twitter with the license so I could test the app.

In that instance private messaging was rather helpful, but I will admit that in most cases it isn’t. I make my email address (well, one of them anyway) rather public, it’s on this site, it’s on my personal site, it’s also on every social network I use. If you really need to contact me, and for some reason you can’t through email… then you just aren’t trying very hard.