I got so far as trying to "claim my shortmail address" but split when your servers / twitter's servers bored me to death where I just wanted to hang myself slow

I got so far as trying to "claim my shortmail address" but split when your servers / twitter's servers bored me to death where I just wanted to hang myself slowly rather than watch the circular doohickey in the tab spin some more. All that said, I couldn't tell from your homepage how it might be different than DM through a twit longer. IS THIS ACTUALLY A NEW SERVICE? A NEW PROTOCOL? A NEW ANYTHING? Or is it just longer tweets and some syntactic sugar wrapped in pop3?