"Twitter for e-mail" is worth a second look.

Plenty has been written about Shortmail, the "Twitter for e-mail" startup from Baltimore-based 410 Labs, but almost all of it is the usual journalism-by-press-release. Shortmail is one of the few web apps I can remember adopting and finding genuinely useful in the past couple of years, so it deserves a more thorough accounting. Plus, I recently had the chance to talk to Jonathan Julian, one of the developers at 410 labs, and he explained to me some of the logic of Shortmail that I had been missing.