If they had simply explained that it was an issue of technical limitations, I think everyone would have been A LOT more understanding.
zimzum
· 6 months ago
I don't think so. This is bogus. Actually *filtering* what one sees (like, only replies to people you already knows) is bound to take a lot more database access and processing power.
eas
· 6 months ago
The filtering has long been there, and shouldn't be that expensive. If I were Twitter, I think I'd store followers lists in a denomalized form so that a users list of followers can be a single row retrieval, so: Retrieve followers list for sender, retrieve followers list for @ reply target, calculate intersection of those two lists, publish tweet to queue of each user in the intersection list. Offering the option not to filter involves another lookup for each recipient. I suppose though it would be no more costly to store that info in a flag for each user in a followers list. It could also be handled as a filter on read. All this is speculation though. We don't know the details of Twitter's architecture.
dasil003
· 6 months ago
Good god, can the armchair architect meme please die! Twitter has put real engineering effort into building a scalable system. Your "solution" is just a brainstorm that they had probably within the first month of launching. It will not scale to 1% of their current traffic. The queue system they are running now is more scalable and subtle than anything that anyone is going to convey in a one-off comment. I don't understand why people insist on commenting endlessly out of ignorance.
Michael Bauser
· 6 months ago
You've misunderstood the problem.
In the old system, everytime somebody published an @-reply, Twitter had to run two checks to determine who read that reply in their stream. One check to identify which followers were also following the recipient and another check to see which users wanted to see all @-replies. Keep in mind, that was 2 checks per follower of the person posting the @-reply.
See, that's Twitter's problem: Even though only 2% of users may have been using the "all replies" feature, it still required checking every follower for the flag. So everytime @aplusk posted an @-reply with his milllion-follower account, that was 2 million database lookups. Twitter just cut the processing power required by an @-reply in half, which matters once you start filling Twitter with celebrities and services that have hundreds of thousands of followers.
swag
· 6 months ago
Who didn't presume that this decision wasn't based on the geometric growth of infrastructure costs necessitated by the networked updates of users?
It's laughable to think anyone could believe that Twitter made the change as a user-based decision. As if this major "flaw" in their user experience was impeding their growth...
BJ
· 6 months ago
You know, I don't necessarily even want to 'discover' new people; sometimes I just like to see what other people are talking about, and maybe join in or just read something interesting. Without the @ replies, I'd pretty much have to follow every person on Twitter to be able to do that.
Leslie T
· 6 months ago
Isn't this just the tip of the iceberg, with respect to Twitter scalability in general? After all, there's really not any difference between replies and any other tweet. If they've removed it just to cut volume, it does not bode well. In the meantime, apparently individual users can work around the current situation by not putting the @username as the first thing in their tweet.
Ludo
· 6 months ago
I dont want a recommendation engine. I want to be able to step into debates when theyre happening and take part in conversations I want to see everything the people I am following are saying and I want to know right away. How else do you get to know people other than by being able to contribute to the existing conversation? I need to be able to see who my followees are talking to. Whats the point of social networking without the social, and without the network?
Doug S.
· 6 months ago
I don't think Twitter gets it. The reason we're peeved isn't just because we no longer meet new people through twitter it's also because we can no longer take part in larger conversations via Twitter. I'd have to follow everyone that I follow also follows. If I was lucky that'd leave me only following half of the entirety of twitter.
Twitter really is turning into the new Facebook; they can't do anything right either.
Rob Quigley
· 6 months ago
SUGGESTION: add PR in front of @ to create public reply; leave out for mutual follower exclusivity #fixreplies #twitterfail #prfix
E.G. (public reply):
PR @soandso - Congrats on inventing the cure for all diseases!
Sharon McPherson
· 6 months ago
websmythe, yes, you can do that as a way to get around it, but putting characters at the beginning of or the @username at the end of tweets creates a problem because peeps who had chosen not to see all replies will see them too, and many of them are saying they will unfollow anyone who uses this "fix".
Rob Quigley
· 6 months ago
Someone could have done this "fix" before -- at least now this convention allows someone the option to send a public reply when passing along info in the form of an @ response that might be important to all your followers.
infenoenigma
· 6 months ago
You're exactly right. I don't want to see every reply. I follow 400+ people, many of whom engage in conversations whenever they're spoken to. I don't need to see half of everything.
I'm completely fine with this change (although I personally would suggest giving us the option to see all @ replies on a user-by-user basis, like they do with the option to receive SMS's). What I will not be fine with is if people start using !@soandso or .@soandso or PR @soandso every time they reply to someone. That is going to fill my twitter stream up with noise, plain and simple, and that's not okay.
ChrisJStone
· 6 months ago
When I saw the headline, I could already imagine the problem. They wanted to fix something in the system, but instead of admitting it, they wanted to wrap it in fluffy BS, to make it seem like they were doing us a favor. :P
Also, I think this is the cause for the recent huge redesign of Facebook that lost a lot of features in the process. They lied about a live news feed, just to simplify the system, but I am so happy that they're not only getting those features back now, but adding many more. I'd expect the same from Twitter.
alisazhao1102
· 4 months ago
If you’re a dedicated follower of tiffany like me. Don't miss the tiffanys & co. on sale including pendants, necklace, earrings, bracelets on line. tiffany jewelry is the one thing that outlasts the cake, champagne and music. links of london jewelry discount , famous for its sweetie and friendship bracelets.Ed hardy designer, christian audigier , is a brand of ed hardy, and now are favored in the moderning world as a mark of its nice tatoo.
Sb
· 6 months ago
Frankly, I'm not really sure I buy the "technical limitation" explanation, unless it's simply the fact that it reduces the number of tweets that need to be shown to each user, thus giving Twitter some *very temporary* scaling headroom. I mean, think about it. @replies are just like any other tweet, aside from the fact that they start with the character '@'. There was a time when Twitter didn't treat them as special in any way. From this perspective, it seems that it's actually more challenging from an engineering perspective to *not* show them: you have to check if someone is following the recipient before deciding whether or not to show a reply to them. Just showing everything without any filtering should be trivial.
I grant that these things are always more complicated than they seem from the outside. But if the explanation is true, I think some very poor engineering decisions were made...
Trina
· 6 months ago
I agree with this completely. Twitter is obviously having bandwidth issues, and they are trying to deal with it as quietly as possible. If they need more help and money, allow us to donate. I know donations aren't a permanent fix, but this is obviously a way to cut down on clutter.
Michael Bauser
· 6 months ago
You're not very good with cost/benefit analysis. You're advocating an approach that would make Twitter less usable?
If 98% of users didn't want to see all replies, using resources to filter those out makes perfect sense.
Using resources to add them back in for the 2% who did, probably makes less sense.
Your argument is all extremes, and no sense.
Laura
· 6 months ago
I'm sure this is a great article. Too bad I can only read half of it, since the right half is obscured by the stupid advertising.
zimzum
· 6 months ago
Now they're just making up excuses.
Someone post it, I want to read it. Easy.
This is not about usability or anything. They're trying to shape conversations to how they want them to be... linear. It's funny that a company that holds the best example of emergent social behavior today is trying sh*t like this and just cutting on what they allow one to do.
Liz
· 6 months ago
I still don't understand how they can expand in some areas (going from @replies to @mentions, new trending topics on right-hand menu bar, adding a Suggested Users list, etc.) and not be able to scale a feature that Twitter claims is only used by a small number of users.
If it is such a little used feature, why is it such a problem? I just know that if this doesn't get restored, Twitter will be less useful to me and I will spend a lot less time on it. Everything that makes it more "functional" makes it more banal and less interesting to me.
Michael Bauser
· 6 months ago
When you posted a @reply in the old system, Twitter had to check the account of every one of your followers twice. Once to see if they following the person you replied to, and again to see if they were a "show all replies" user.
Apparently, they decided that doing a database check where only 1/50 results is "Yes" isn't worth the processing effort, so they dropped it, which means every @reply is only half as much work for Twitter's computers as it used to be. This might be important now that there are so many acccounts with 100K+ followers.
If reducing the amount of processing per tweet is their goal, it makes sense to start with the feature that had the lowest effective return (in that 98% of the time, it produced no human-visible result).
(Expanding @replies to @mentions is actually a lot smaller change, because Twitter only has to look up the accounts mentioned in the tweet. That has a much higher "success rate," in that people very seldom tweet about accounts that don't exist, so every lookup produces a human-visible result.)
@mequoda
· 6 months ago
I've always used @ replies to find new interesting people. Makes you think the Twitter folk don't really use their own service the same way their users do. I dunno. Now everyone is just putting periods before their @'s. Works for me.
Sam Oltz
· 6 months ago
If this feature had to be removed because it wouldn't scale, I'd say that was an oversight on the part of the engineering team.
Rosetta
· 6 months ago
I don't get it. Isn't it less work for Twitter to just have everyone see every post from their friends? Isn't it more work to filter it so that I don't see posts that have an @ and then a name that I'm not also subscribed to? The latter is a much more complicated rule than the former.
Erin
· 6 months ago
Well thanks for the lack of honesty and integrity Twitter. Now I have to wonder WHICH story is bogus. Nothing like a company that instills a sense of trustworthiness and integrity. Pffft.
Kee Hinckley
· 6 months ago
I'm happy to say that I created the #fixreplies hashtag. My 5 minutes of fame is over.
I posted the following to Twitter's third-party development list.
@biz has posted and claimed that the reason for this change has to do with the underlying system architecture, which wasn't going to support viewing replies to unfollowed people much longer. (Personally, my mind boggles at that, filtering replies by a dynamically changing list of people is *easier* than not filtering them at all? Whatever.) Clearly this is a side effect of an architecture change in the past, since originally "@foo" didn't mean anything at all to the database. So somebody made an architecture decision sometime ago without considering the social ramifications. That sucks. My recommendation is to back the change out real quick to mollify folks, and then have an emergency meeting about how you're going to fix the architecture before whatever you did wrong breaks it--because you just took the viral out of Twitter. (And worse, made #followfriday a permanent fixture!)
How major a change is this?
Well, I wouldn't have my current job, house or girlfriend without being able to see other people's replies. I wouldn't have hired my virtual admin, or had a vacation this summer in Florida. I have two sets of friends who wouldn't be engaged without that feature. There are high-level analysts following me because I interjected something useful into a conversation they were having with a client--that wouldn't have happened. There are people I don't know, whose problems I solved because I saw a friend talking with them--that wouldn't have happened.
Somewhere along the line, Twitter appears to have fallen for the "add 10,000 followers in one month" crap. This isn't about how many people you can follow. This isn't some grade school popularity competition. This is about conversations. It's about listening to people talk to each other, learning who you like, who you don't. It's about learning new things and helping other people. There *is* no replacement for this feature that will provide the same functionality, or even *close* to the functionality. This isn't an opportunity (as someone on the dev list suggested) for a third-party to use the API, this is an opportunity for Google to eat Twitter's lunch.
Were lots of people using the feature? I have no idea. Certainly your core early adopters were. Certainly the social media folks (who write most of your press) were. Are the new folks who come to follow celebs or just chat with their friends using it? No, probably not. The fact of the matter is the UI for that setting sucked rocks. First you have the fundamental confusion between "followers" (a noun) and "following" (a verb AND a noun). Put the two together and you can figure it out, have "following" by itself, and you have no idea. That you get used to, but it's confusing to new users. Add in that sometimes the site talks about "friends"--g*d knows what those are. Then you attempted to explain the settings in a menu item instead of using a simple English sentence, and finally you had the wrong default (don't see replies sent to people I don't follow) for new users. Every time I told someone about that setting, they were like "Oh! *That's* why I never saw anyone talking!" I *knew* what the settings did and I still found the text confusing. Whenever I told someone about it, I had to reread the site to make sure I got it right. Blaming lack of use on a bad UI is just lazy.
Twitter is a transport. Different people use it very differently. What Twitter just did is like someone taking email and deciding that mailing lists aren't really very important, since they are used by very few people, so we'll just remove the ability to have a mailing list. After all, it simplifies authentication, and it reduces traffic. Unfortunately, a core set of very important people really, really need mailing lists. It's how they network, meet people, develop ideas, and improve software like... Twitter. Oops.
Rob Quigley
· 6 months ago
Maybe you can promote this hashtag as well: #prfix
infernoenigma
· 6 months ago
I understand a lot of what you're saying, but I really don't get some of it. For example, how did they take the viral out of twitter? That's an insanely hyperbolic statement, something I think the creator of the #fixreplies hashtag (which by definition went viral within an hour or two, TOPS.) Retweeting still works, which is how MOST things on twitter spread virally.
Kee Hinckley
· 6 months ago
Hashtags are viral, but they build temporary communities. Listening to people talk to other people builds longer-term communities.
That said, apparently this feature was used by only 3% of the Twitter population (which is still a large number of people). Unfortunately for Twitter, that 3% was a rather vocal part of the population--those people who used twitter for building communities and socializing; not for announcements, following celebrities, or chatting with a fixed set of friends. It's a classic example of why you don't want to add or remove features in an application by voting on them--not all users are equally important to your company.
sean macdhai
· 6 months ago
.."technically difficult" to let me see all the posts for the users I follow? WTF??? I call bullshit.
Kee Hinckley
· 6 months ago
It has to be related to caching somehow, but I agree. I have a lot of trouble imagining a database structure that makes it hard. They've got to be doing something weird with replies that takes them out of the main flow of your feed. Presumably they make an exception for people you follow (although that must make large follower lists pretty painful). That would explain why per-person-I-follow-settings are actually easier than not filtering at all. But it's still weird.
DMo
· 6 months ago
I'm also worried that the recommendation engine may be weighted, like the Suggested Users feature. The best part about #followfriday is that it's completey democratic—as the best content on the Web always is—and I get to find interesting people to follow based on the content they produce. Not based on their follower count or celebrity status.
Benjamin Dobson
· 6 months ago
Lack of honesty and transparency. Let's hope this is more Apple-product-style than Apple-business-style.
Keltraine
· 6 months ago
Hey I sent out a tweet about this over an hour ago, which @mikeprasad did a RT on; just put a "." or "-" before your @reply and it works like before.
So if I reply with "-@mikeprasad <blah, blah> you'll see it even with the new change b/c it doesn't START with an @! Voila, problem solved! http://twitter.com/keltraine
Rob Quigley
· 6 months ago
Take a look at this hashtag #prfix - a standardized convention like the "RT" is important. Thx.
Michael Bauser
· 6 months ago
"Problem solved," except for the vast majority of your followers who (if they're like the vast majority of other Twitter followers) don't want to see @replies to people they don't follow. You're putting your need for self-promotion above the needs of your followers to understand what the hell you're talking about.
Do you really think you're so important that all your followers need to see all your half-conversations? If so, you're not really on Twitter for "conversation" -- you're on Twitter for self-aggrandizement.
tomit
· 6 months ago
If it's something that they need to fix or replace, why not just turn the @ replies on instead of restricting it for all of us?
tomit
· 6 months ago
I meant "IF IT'S" not is it's.
socialnerdia
· 6 months ago
If Twitter goes back to normal, people will love it so much they'll forget about this whole thing. Funny how removing something and bringing it back is better than doing nothing. We'll see if Twitter realizes this.
allison
· 6 months ago
So, there was this feature. And it was working. And then they pulled it and people complained. Now they say, "it was serious technical problem." Could they be more vague? I'm not buying it.
infernoenigma
· 6 months ago
Persnickety grammar thing, sorry guys:
The change, which removes the option to view “half conversations” between someone you follow and someone you don’t, allowed users to find new interesting people and expand their Twitter networks.
This sentence should be re-worded. The way it stands, you're saying that "the change... allowed users to find new interesting people." Which isn't what you meant.
--
As far as the controversy itself, I think a lot of people are just angry because they don't like having options taken away, which I completely understand. Personally, though, I have no idea why anyone would want to see all @ replies someone I'm following writes. There are some people who do almost nothing but interact with their followers, which is great, and I don't want to see half of every one of those conversations. Some people have been saying on the #fixreplies stream that they're removing @ replies FROM people you don't follow, which is completely false and I think may have a lot to do with the outcry-- people don't get what they did.
Jon Holmes
· 6 months ago
Am interested in knowing what their ideas for this "discovery system" (mentioned in the last part of Pete's article above) are. The current 'recommended users to follow' needs an overhaul. You should be able to search user's location and bios from within Twitter - I know third-party websites like Tweepsearch offer this. Anyone else got any ideas for the "discovery system"?
Michael Bauser
· 6 months ago
I keep wondering why they don't emulate Facebook's "People You May Know" feature -- that is, if my Friend A & my Friend B are following Person C, recommend Person C as someone I might want to follow.
Russell Albert
· 6 months ago
The Twits at Twitter are Tools. They're not giving the full story...
Bob Massey
· 6 months ago
Regarding the initial explanation of "it was confusing"...The only thing potentially confusing about the way it was is that I could see some people not realizing (at least for a little while) their @reply was being seen by all followers and not just the designated recipient. So to me if anything needed to be changed it would have been to add a setting allowing users' @replies to be seen by all or only that person. And keep the choice to read all such comments from people or just their updates and the @replies directed at you. Default behavior could have been the more private option for each, since it is believed the other way is "undesirable."
Lun Esex
· 6 months ago
Read/follow http://twitter.com/fix_replies on Twitter for info/history/workarounds on this and if you disagree w/ Twitter's decision to hide replies to people you don't follow.
No one used the features that were disabled. Most of the people who are complaining don't know what they are complaining about. They are only complaining because everyone else is. Stop reinforcing the stereotype that Twitter users are whiners.
Get over it. There are 10 bazillion other ways to follow new people.
Twitter is free. Enjoy it.
Kalv
· 6 months ago
I think they should've made the decision with the users, but then again they have the right to do what they want, we don't pay anything :) I'd rather have a limited service working that one that isn't.
Check out an app I just mashed up at http://fixreplies.kalv.co.uk - it's currently got a total of 11k people in disagreement based on their RT message that's been flying around today.
Florin Anghel
· 6 months ago
But I want to see the conversations between the people I follow and their friends! And there's no other feature that the Twitter team can implement to replace that one. Are they that stupid, or they're just pretending? After all, that's exactly what made Twitter so addictive. But I guess those guys are the only Twitter users that don't understand the real fun of using this social service. Yeah, I'm tough, but I'm fair!
travist120
· 6 months ago
I really don't understand.
Wouldn't they have to use some sort of "if" statement? Considering that it shows and @reply that has characters in front of it. It's got to check to see if you are following the person being mentioned, and with the new update, it has to check to see if there is an "in_reply_to_status_id"...ISN'T THAT MORE CODE THEN JUST DISPLAYING IT ALL?!
Stephanie Booth
· 6 months ago
For me, the importance of partial conversations has not been mentioned in your post: those conversations are part of the "Twitter-life" of those I follow -- and that's the main reason I want to see them.
anon
· 6 months ago
I really just want to see EVERYTHING my friends say, regardless of what it is. I don't see how letting me see everything is more difficult than having to filter out some things... seems like it'd be the other way around. I'm really, really frustrated.
eric
· 6 months ago
It's not just about finding interesting people though, so a "recommendation engine" isn't a complete substitute. I've seen many a tweet where an @reply is made with no real intention of the named person even seeing the tweet, but is instead expressed that way as a form of rhetoric. This is particularly evident when an @reply is made to someone that person doesn't even follow (let alone be followed by).
For example, I don't follow @oprah (and though I haven't checked I'm confident she's not following me either) ... and so a tweet like "@oprah pls bugger off kkthxbai!" is intended to be _seen_ by my friends, even if they too don't follow @oprah.
So, that's one unexpected usage which will be crushed. There are likely other forms of discourse also crippled in the crossfire. Gee, thanks.
ECS Dave
· 6 months ago
If you do NOT use the "reply to" button/feature the conversation is "broken", the "trail" is lost. Add your voice in favor of returning the CHOICE for all @replies http://gsfn.us/t/6g7y The "half" of the conversation you wanted to follow, is "gone" unless you "search" for it. And, if you're "late" to the conversation... Good Luck on finding it...
Tweet This! Add your voice in favor of returning the CHOICE for all @replies http://gsfn.us/t/6g7y #fixreplies Tweet This!
The issue with recommendations is it wont work for me. I like to follow people / find people from people I currently follow as they are involved in things that I do, like user groups, products and/or services. A recommendation system will only push the big names to me which I may or may not have any interest in! #fixreplies!!!
@idaAa / Ida Aalen
· 6 months ago
I've suggested how the @replies-settings could have been designed differently, and then confusion shouldn't really have been a problem: http://bit.ly/confusion
@replies aren't really that confusing, Twitter almost seemed to try to make them more complicated than they really were.
Michael
· 6 months ago
What I find amazing is that Twitter has recently landed a HUGE amount of additional funding. The only thing that users have seen happen with the service is a removal of functionality. This begs a few questions:
What is Twitter using their money for, new office chairs? Who in their right mind offers functionality for their product that they're not prepared to scale? I can see that perhaps Twitter has been caught off guard by the numbers their getting thanks to Oprah and Ellen, but honesty especially with your hard core users, would have been nice. How is this going to effect companies like Comcast who are doing such a great job responding to issues through Twitter, if they can only see conversations aimed at them? Other than being driven to use 3rd party apps with API call limitations?
Bonnie Hancock(Honeyberrie)
· 6 months ago
Dear twitter techies, I believe in truthfulness,fairness,equality,enabling,not disabling our voices;I believe in quality, not necessarily quanity,but where ,the limitation of friends,business possibilies,in mid conference is broken,and the ability to move forward is squelched,(for what ever reason you can drum up);is insulting seekers,followers and businesses .We trustingly put profiles, links, private information in some cases in your hands..Also I heard this has been a cause of monetary losses for more than one person..Many of the tactics of changing rules,taking away members you follow,and abruptly changing the way you answer others,causing file bugs to come up and only save what you respond to a follower to your own computer I;m sure you have you legal department working on each item as it comes up.,at lease I hope so.
I would seriously like you techies to think of us twitterers as ,"TWITTER". We are the members. the Congregation so to speak and without us ,Twitter is nothing but a name..Keep disecting Twitter and soon it could become very still and lifeless..Lets see what kind of respect you can drum up for people who are here to teach others how to do business, or join a business venture,People who come on here to learn more about Social Networking,in the near future. I observe you as you observe me.
All Comments
Hope the tech team sorts it out soon *WInks*
@maynaseric
http://twitter.com/websmythe/status/1786967708
In the old system, everytime somebody published an @-reply, Twitter had to run two checks to determine who read that reply in their stream. One check to identify which followers were also following the recipient and another check to see which users wanted to see all @-replies. Keep in mind, that was 2 checks per follower of the person posting the @-reply.
See, that's Twitter's problem: Even though only 2% of users may have been using the "all replies" feature, it still required checking every follower for the flag. So everytime @aplusk posted an @-reply with his milllion-follower account, that was 2 million database lookups. Twitter just cut the processing power required by an @-reply in half, which matters once you start filling Twitter with celebrities and services that have hundreds of thousands of followers.
It's laughable to think anyone could believe that Twitter made the change as a user-based decision. As if this major "flaw" in their user experience was impeding their growth...
Twitter really is turning into the new Facebook; they can't do anything right either.
E.G. (public reply):
PR @soandso - Congrats on inventing the cure for all diseases!
I'm completely fine with this change (although I personally would suggest giving us the option to see all @ replies on a user-by-user basis, like they do with the option to receive SMS's). What I will not be fine with is if people start using !@soandso or .@soandso or PR @soandso every time they reply to someone. That is going to fill my twitter stream up with noise, plain and simple, and that's not okay.
Also, I think this is the cause for the recent huge redesign of Facebook that lost a lot of features in the process. They lied about a live news feed, just to simplify the system, but I am so happy that they're not only getting those features back now, but adding many more. I'd expect the same from Twitter.
I grant that these things are always more complicated than they seem from the outside. But if the explanation is true, I think some very poor engineering decisions were made...
If 98% of users didn't want to see all replies, using resources to filter those out makes perfect sense.
Using resources to add them back in for the 2% who did, probably makes less sense.
Your argument is all extremes, and no sense.
Someone post it, I want to read it. Easy.
This is not about usability or anything. They're trying to shape conversations to how they want them to be... linear. It's funny that a company that holds the best example of emergent social behavior today is trying sh*t like this and just cutting on what they allow one to do.
If it is such a little used feature, why is it such a problem? I just know that if this doesn't get restored, Twitter will be less useful to me and I will spend a lot less time on it. Everything that makes it more "functional" makes it more banal and less interesting to me.
Apparently, they decided that doing a database check where only 1/50 results is "Yes" isn't worth the processing effort, so they dropped it, which means every @reply is only half as much work for Twitter's computers as it used to be. This might be important now that there are so many acccounts with 100K+ followers.
If reducing the amount of processing per tweet is their goal, it makes sense to start with the feature that had the lowest effective return (in that 98% of the time, it produced no human-visible result).
(Expanding @replies to @mentions is actually a lot smaller change, because Twitter only has to look up the accounts mentioned in the tweet. That has a much higher "success rate," in that people very seldom tweet about accounts that don't exist, so every lookup produces a human-visible result.)
I posted the following to Twitter's third-party development list.
@biz has posted and claimed that the reason for this change has to do with the underlying system architecture, which wasn't going to support viewing replies to unfollowed people much longer. (Personally, my mind boggles at that, filtering replies by a dynamically changing list of people is *easier* than not filtering them at all? Whatever.) Clearly this is a side effect of an architecture change in the past, since originally "@foo" didn't mean anything at all to the database. So somebody made an architecture decision sometime ago without considering the social ramifications. That sucks. My recommendation is to back the change out real quick to mollify folks, and then have an emergency meeting about how you're going to fix the architecture before whatever you did wrong breaks it--because you just took the viral out of Twitter. (And worse, made #followfriday a permanent fixture!)
How major a change is this?
Well, I wouldn't have my current job, house or girlfriend without being able to see other people's replies. I wouldn't have hired my virtual admin, or had a vacation this summer in Florida. I have two sets of friends who wouldn't be engaged without that feature. There are high-level analysts following me because I interjected something useful into a conversation they were having with a client--that wouldn't have happened. There are people I don't know, whose problems I solved because I saw a friend talking with them--that wouldn't have happened.
Somewhere along the line, Twitter appears to have fallen for the "add 10,000 followers in one month" crap. This isn't about how many people you can follow. This isn't some grade school popularity competition. This is about conversations. It's about listening to people talk to each other, learning who you like, who you don't. It's about learning new things and helping other people. There *is* no replacement for this feature that will provide the same functionality, or even *close* to the functionality. This isn't an opportunity (as someone on the dev list suggested) for a third-party to use the API, this is an opportunity for Google to eat Twitter's lunch.
Were lots of people using the feature? I have no idea. Certainly your core early adopters were. Certainly the social media folks (who write most of your press) were. Are the new folks who come to follow celebs or just chat with their friends using it? No, probably not. The fact of the matter is the UI for that setting sucked rocks. First you have the fundamental confusion between "followers" (a noun) and "following" (a verb AND a noun). Put the two together and you can figure it out, have "following" by itself, and you have no idea. That you get used to, but it's confusing to new users. Add in that sometimes the site talks about "friends"--g*d knows what those are. Then you attempted to explain the settings in a menu item instead of using a simple English sentence, and finally you had the wrong default (don't see replies sent to people I don't follow) for new users. Every time I told someone about that setting, they were like "Oh! *That's* why I never saw anyone talking!" I *knew* what the settings did and I still found the text confusing. Whenever I told someone about it, I had to reread the site to make sure I got it right. Blaming lack of use on a bad UI is just lazy.
Twitter is a transport. Different people use it very differently. What Twitter just did is like someone taking email and deciding that mailing lists aren't really very important, since they are used by very few people, so we'll just remove the ability to have a mailing list. After all, it simplifies authentication, and it reduces traffic. Unfortunately, a core set of very important people really, really need mailing lists. It's how they network, meet people, develop ideas, and improve software like... Twitter. Oops.
That said, apparently this feature was used by only 3% of the Twitter population (which is still a large number of people). Unfortunately for Twitter, that 3% was a rather vocal part of the population--those people who used twitter for building communities and socializing; not for announcements, following celebrities, or chatting with a fixed set of friends. It's a classic example of why you don't want to add or remove features in an application by voting on them--not all users are equally important to your company.
So if I reply with "-@mikeprasad <blah, blah> you'll see it even with the new change b/c it doesn't START with an @! Voila, problem solved! http://twitter.com/keltraine
Do you really think you're so important that all your followers need to see all your half-conversations? If so, you're not really on Twitter for "conversation" -- you're on Twitter for self-aggrandizement.
The change, which removes the option to view “half conversations” between someone you follow and someone you don’t, allowed users to find new interesting people and expand their Twitter networks.
This sentence should be re-worded. The way it stands, you're saying that "the change... allowed users to find new interesting people." Which isn't what you meant.
--
As far as the controversy itself, I think a lot of people are just angry because they don't like having options taken away, which I completely understand. Personally, though, I have no idea why anyone would want to see all @ replies someone I'm following writes. There are some people who do almost nothing but interact with their followers, which is great, and I don't want to see half of every one of those conversations. Some people have been saying on the #fixreplies stream that they're removing @ replies FROM people you don't follow, which is completely false and I think may have a lot to do with the outcry-- people don't get what they did.
Get over it. There are 10 bazillion other ways to follow new people.
Twitter is free. Enjoy it.
Check out an app I just mashed up at http://fixreplies.kalv.co.uk - it's currently got a total of 11k people in disagreement based on their RT message that's been flying around today.
Wouldn't they have to use some sort of "if" statement? Considering that it shows and @reply that has characters in front of it. It's got to check to see if you are following the person being mentioned, and with the new update, it has to check to see if there is an "in_reply_to_status_id"...ISN'T THAT MORE CODE THEN JUST DISPLAYING IT ALL?!
For example, I don't follow @oprah (and though I haven't checked I'm confident she's not following me either) ... and so a tweet like "@oprah pls bugger off kkthxbai!" is intended to be _seen_ by my friends, even if they too don't follow @oprah.
So, that's one unexpected usage which will be crushed. There are likely other forms of discourse also crippled in the crossfire. Gee, thanks.
Tweet This!
Add your voice in favor of returning the CHOICE for all @replies http://gsfn.us/t/6g7y #fixreplies
Tweet This!
Be Well!
ECS Dave - http://twitter.com/ECS_Dave
http://bit.ly/confusion
@replies aren't really that confusing, Twitter almost seemed to try to make them more complicated than they really were.
What is Twitter using their money for, new office chairs?
Who in their right mind offers functionality for their product that they're not prepared to scale? I can see that perhaps Twitter has been caught off guard by the numbers their getting thanks to Oprah and Ellen, but honesty especially with your hard core users, would have been nice.
How is this going to effect companies like Comcast who are doing such a great job responding to issues through Twitter, if they can only see conversations aimed at them? Other than being driven to use 3rd party apps with API call limitations?
I believe in truthfulness,fairness,equality,enabling,not disabling our voices;I believe in quality, not necessarily quanity,but where ,the limitation of friends,business possibilies,in mid conference is broken,and the ability to move forward is squelched,(for what ever reason you can drum up);is insulting seekers,followers and businesses .We trustingly put profiles, links, private information in some cases in your hands..Also I heard this has been a cause of monetary losses for more than one person..Many of the tactics of changing rules,taking away members you follow,and abruptly changing the way you answer others,causing file bugs to come up and only save what you respond to a follower to your own computer I;m sure you have you legal department working on each item as it comes up.,at lease I hope so.
I would seriously like you techies to think of us twitterers as ,"TWITTER". We are the members. the Congregation so to speak and without us ,Twitter is nothing but a name..Keep disecting Twitter
and soon it could become very still and lifeless..Lets see what kind of respect you can drum up for people who are here to teach others how to do business, or join a business venture,People who come on here to learn more about Social Networking,in the near future. I observe you as you observe me.
@TWITTER TECHIES, what are YOU doing@Honeyberrie