Huge foofoorah (for those who have any interested) over in the Twitterverse about an option that was taken off by Twitter. And I yawn and say ho-hum.
Okay, Twitter 101: You sign up. You find (through various means, more below) various people who are Twittering. You “follow” them, so that their Tweets show up in your message stream (what Twitter somewhat confusingly calls your “timeline”).
If someone says something you feel warrants a reply, you can reply to them. The reply looks like, “@doycet LOL, you are eating a sammitch on the sofa? ROTFL” (Note: not real reply.)
Previously, if you were following me, you could see me make that comment to @doycet (that’s Doyce’s Twitter user name) in your message stream. If you were not following Doyce, you wouldn’t have seen the original message that had me rolling in the aisle, but you would have seen my reply …
… if … and this is the big if … you’d turned on the option (off by default) to do so. Otherwise, you’d have never seen my orphaned reply, either.
Twitter has now taken away that option, feeling it was conflusing. Apparently, only 2% of Twitter users actually had it turned on, but they are a vocal 2%, decrying the death of Twitter and noting that these sort of one-sided replies from people they follow were a great way to find additional people to follow.
Um …
Okay, maybe I’m insensitive because I’m part of the 98% that had it turned off. Honestly, I didn’t want to read the umpteen zillion replies that Neil Gaiman makes to people on a daily basis. Well, I might, but I wouldn’t be able to see anything else. On the other hand, Neil (and others) do a great job both retweeting items of interest from others (basically forwarding a Tweet message to their own stream, which shows who originally wrote it), and in mentioning people in their Tweets (sometimes even as a specific recommendation).
Result? I get plenty of suggestions of new people to follow from the people I follow, even if I’m not privy to their individual replies to those folks.
I’ll take it a step further — I like not having my replies to others show up in my followers’ streams. Not only does it reduce their exposure to spam / false followers, but I tend to see those replies as IMs — I know they are (were) theoretically public, but they still felt private.
I will admit that, given a choice, I’d have left the option available to those 2% — I don’t specifically see the harm in it. But I also don’t think Twitter has committed some grievous wrong in doing this, and there is a virtue in simplicity and consistency.
I’ve been meaning to talk about my own use of Twitter of late, and this is as good a chance as any.
I’ve found it to be a nice way to make one-off observations, on the fly, that wouldn’t have warranted a full blog post previously (some would have ended up in one, others would not).
The 140 character limit is irksome, but hardly impossible to overcome. Probably good for me. And fun to read — like an ever-changing book of koans, with links.
I very much like that these observations get wrapped up at the end of the day in my blog anyway. It makes it all the more “journally.”
I enjoy reading the bits that come through on my Twitter feed (following 41 people, though only a dozen or so of those Tweet with any consistency). They are an adjunct to other sources of info, and have a light air to them that is quite pleasant.
I like.
Speaking as one of the 2%, here are my four (five?) points:
1) I think a good 3/4ths of my finding people to follow have been through responses others have made. It reminds me of people I should be looking for, and more importantly, of people who are active and tweeting.
2) I hate anything that reduces functionality. “Taking Away Features” is one of the things that tweaks me.
2b) It’s not “the death of Twitter” and there’s certainly no question that I’ll still be using it (albeit just as quietly as I do now) without the function.
3) I don’t believe anything posted on the web or e-mail is truly private, so I tend to keep that in mind when I write.
4) I don’t “retweet.” I barely use hash tags. The latter I think is something I’ll probably repair as time goes on and my quantity of posting increases, but I don’t see the former happening. (For one thing, if I feel strongly enough about something, I’d much rather write a post on it than repeat someone else’s point.) I also don’t do a lot of linking, BUT…
…and this it the big “but,” my Twitter usage is not oriented towards promotion or a lot of the other reasons people use Twitter.
As noted, I, too, disagree with removing functionality. I was just overwhelmed by the amount of hyperbole over the change.
Twitter has backed away (a bit?) from this change ( https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/2009/05/testing-for-prizes.html ):
So you’ll see tweets sent to others you don’t follow — but only if they are manually typed in rather than from hitting Reply. I can’t imagine that’s a huge percentage of them.
Second, it sounds like they’re looking to bring back in the feature they turned off, but a bit more slickly (though hopefully with care not to complicate the simple Twitter interface).
More importantly, it sounds like the real reason the original feature was turned off was due to performance vs. some sort of philosophical vision. That’s fine, and actually a good thing — but I wish they’d been up front about it.
And an even longer note on the subject: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/replies-kerfuffle.html
There are some good lessons learned here for anyone in development.
Which is what needed to be done up front. But it’s good that they’re doing it now.
If nothing else, a note of “Hey, if you turn this on you might not be able to see the forest for the trees” next to the option would be handy.
I still suspect that the technical problems were more of a driver for this than the design problems. Regardless, based on the technical issues described (and the user-base impact), this change was pretty much a no-brainer … if communicated properly.
(Concluding text skipped.)