Likelihood of Success

Twitter’s radical reply rework

May 13, 2009 Social networking

Marshall Kirkpatrick:

It’s not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter’s settings this afternoon has already greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. Fragmented conversations, they are called. This isn’t a small change at all, it’s big and it’s bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery.

Wow.

I don’t have much time for Twitter any more, though it has its focused uses.  This, however, really is a radical change.  And I agree:  It is a bad one.

UPDATE:  Fixed?  Or not?

[T]oday, Twitter relented and gave users the feature back. Only they did so in a way that is hilariously convoluted.

Previously, if you wanted to see another user’s @replies even if they were talking to someone you weren’t following, you had to select that option in the settings. Some people had, and enjoyed it. But the default setting for that was off, so Twitter simply removed the option to turn it on. But some users loved it so Twitter is now turning it back on — kind of. Apparently, soon you will be able to see these @replies again but only when a person is using them when not clicking the “reply” button.

So basically, you can see when someone is replying to someone else but only when they’re not really replying to them. Yeah, this is going to confuse the hell out of people. Remember “Keep It Simple, Stupid“? Yeah, this is the opposite.

I consider myself a pretty savvy Twitter user and I had to read it twice to understand just what the hell Twitter meant. I also just had a hilarious conversation with fellow writer Jason Kincaid, where we debated just what exactly Twitter meant. The fact that we had to have that conversation is not a good sign.