by Unknown 3:17 AM 0 comments

Netiquette: Texting or tweeting, time may not be on your side

When you send those texts, tweets or other digital messages can reflect poorly on you if you're not careful.

Timestamps are all over the ever-loving place on the Web: on your tweets, Facebook posts, text messages, ill-thought-out, angry e-mails to exes, etc.

And let me tell you, true friends and trolls, those little numbers matter more than you think.

Let's consider the aforementioned ill-thought-out, angry e-mail to an ex (because who hasn't sent one of those): Send it at 3 p.m. on a Monday, and you come off as righteous and wronged. Send it at 3 a.m. on a Saturday, and you come off as dangerous and deranged.

And that's just the tip of the numerical iceberg, kids. Read on for four instances in which timing is everything.

Texting a potential date

ou're a notorious night hawk, a rebel with a very good cause: monitoring the feeding habits of a very rare species of owl.

Consequently, you are mostly nocturnal. However, you still manage to meet a lovely "daylight person" (as you call people who adhere to the mainstream constraints of timekeeping) at jury duty one day.

A few nights pass, and you finally work up the urge to text her an invite to coffee, a missive you shoot off in between watching one owl rip off a mouse's head and sorting through another owl's freshly deposited pellets. Three nights later, she still has not responded, perhaps because the timestamp of your text read 3:30 a.m.

Look, we get that everyone is on a different clock and not all denizens of this thing we call Earth are 9-to-5ers, but let's just get this straight right now: If you text a romantic interest after, say, 10 p.m., they're going to think you're (a) drunk, (b) horny, (c) drunk and horny. Save your declarations of like for the daylight hours -- or else seek out a mate with similarly night owl-esque tendencies.