In an effort to reduce costs and increase use of available technologies, The US Postal Service has announced that many of their current services will be replaced by the microblogging service Twitter. In a press conference held by Postmaster General John Potter, some of the upcoming procedural changes were described.
“Starting next month, frivolous or conversational mail will no longer be delivered. Instead, it will be opened and read by our staff and sent to the recipient via Twitter direct message. If letters or parcels contain any goods or items, photographs of said items will be displayed on the USPS Posterous and the url DMed to the recipient. We realize that not everyone has a Twitter account yet or knows what it is. To facilitate the transition, we encourage members of the public who are already using Twitter to talk about it like it’s the greatest thing ever, and shame anyone not using it with condescending pity.We suggest ‘Oh, you’re not using Twitter yet? Really? That’s a shame.’
“Though our method of delivery will change, we will continue to employ all of our letter carriers. Instead of bringing you physical mail, though, they will now simply knock on you door to remind you that you have some tweets you haven’t read yet. We hope these changes will help us better serve you in your moments of drunken boasting, discussing how much your life sucks or doesn’t suck, and speculating which celebrities are gay.”
Along with Potter’s press conference, the USPS released a pamphlet about the upcoming changes. Much of the money saved on shipping costs will be spent ensuring that Twitter has greater reliability. Their goal for the first year of service is 98.1% uptime.
Twitter founder Evan Williams had this to say:
Comments
Josh
April 1st, 2009 - 11:37:47 AM
can you pay bills over twitter? if so, i might grow to like this change
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