I have a Google Voice account, and last week they finally enabled a feature to forward your SMS messages to email. This is a long-awaited feature, and much appreciated, as I no longer have to keep a browser tab open to Google Voice all day.

But it’s not enough, because I’m not necessarily by a computer all the time, and because SMS tends to be most useful when one is out and about, and it tends to be for things that demand instant notification and attention.

I don’t want to enable Push or Fetch on my normal email account, though, because I only want to be notified about SMS messages, not all the other emails I receive on that account. Plus, Push/Fetch tend to introduce an unfavorable Pavlovian aspect to my life, and I want to avoid that as much as possible.

SMS, again, is different, because text messages usually call for a more immediate response. But I don’t want to shell out $0.99 for that Gmail Push notification app — I haven’t paid for a single iPhone app since I got my phone! — and again, I don’t want Push on my Gmail anyway.

So I set up a new Yahoo! account (only because Yahoo! Mail already provides push service for iPhone). It’s dedicated solely to my Google Voice SMS notifications, and while it’s not as in-your-face as a full-on notification (like the one you get with a “normal” text message on the iPhone), it’s just about right for my tastes.

Normal Push Notification on iPhone

Email Push notification

The other advantage of doing it this way is that I can also reply to text messages from that email account.

So there!

Khoa’s blog post about never blogging anymore thanks to Facebook status updates made me realize it was finally time to admit that Twitter has done the same to my own blogging habits. I’ve always had a tough time writing anything in long-form. And Stephen Fry’s recent post about how tough writing is for writers has me convinced it will never get any better.

But microblogging via Twitter and Tumblr seems to fulfill most of my information sharing and self-expression needs. So my main website, esthernam.com, will consist of just that. I might add my flickr account eventually, but that’s about as far as I’m going to go.

There! That feels much better.