Yeah! Everybody's right. That's what I expect from my $25 subscription fee! Right on! Oh, wait. You mean I'm not paying $25 subscription fee for Twitter? You mean it's FREE? WTF's everybody got their undies in a wad about. Adjust.
Scott
· 7 months ago
My sentiments exactly, Farnham. They owe us nothing. They provide an awesome, free service. The entitlement mindset is rampant, though. Maybe Twitter can get bailout money, too. Look how it helped Chrysler. Uh, nevermind.
AdGuy
· 7 months ago
Dear Mashable,
Please get a room. Your crush on Twitter is getting out of hand. You are gushing. Enough already just fuck her would ya!
@at
Cameron Stewart
· 7 months ago
I think it shows that twitter users don't really like surprises and would like to be kept in better contact about the twitter's development roadmap.
Guest
· 7 months ago
Are there any stories about why so many people were up in arms about something that didn't effect them in any way? I'd like to read that. I love Twitter but it's like a rumour mill on crack.
@idaAa / Ida Aalen
· 7 months ago
Hah. Seriously. Those product design flaws ARE NOT difficult to fix, here's a suggestion: http://bit.ly/confusion
Twitter uses a lot of unnecessary technicial jargon on their site and on their help pages. Doesn't really help.
"All @replies" sounded good. "No @replies" sounded scary. Why not call the three different modes more straight-forward things like "Quiet" "Standard" and "Noisy"?
And they should hire (more) user interface designers.
HedgeAccordingly
· 7 months ago
You learn from mistakes, if you do not get hurt you will never learn. THey have learned, they are growing.
James Ronald
· 7 months ago
Very bad week for twitter. You guys should check out the Twitter like site that lets you share 200 character updates and also lets you put photos and videos in your updates. Very cool, and I promise they don't screw up as much as Twitter :) http://www.twibeo.com
PDxsays
· 7 months ago
Why am I supposed to buy the 3%. With the current acknowledgement of the Follow|Unfollow approach ppl have to their accounts - some days you feel like following, then the converso rounds a bend and you unfollow, but then may came back again to where you want to follow - how*ARE* they coming up with this magic 3% that Ev and Biz's world suddenly revolves around?
Let's see the the derivations that=3% guys. Otherwise, it's jsut more number juggling. How conveneint
Michael Bauser
· 7 months ago
How are they "coming up" with the 3% number? It's Twitter's database -- all they need to do is query the database for how many accounts had the "replies" flag set to "all" -- and then divide.by the total number of accounts.
Either you think Twitter is lying, you think Twitter can't form a dirt-simple databse quiery, or you think they can't do simple division. Or maybe you're just talking out of your ass. Which is it?
Langdon
· 7 months ago
Or they aren't taking into account that a good 75% of twitter accounts are created and never used. For active users a logical person would figure the percent would be much much higher.
dwag29
· 7 months ago
you took the words right out of my mouth. there are soooooooooo many inactive accounts due to people who sign up just to see what twitter is about or because they hear oprah is on it, but never tweet. and then there are the spammers who don't actually read the tweets of the 10,000 people they follow.
if twitter could query their db based on a minimum # of tweets sent to determine "active" users, the number who use the all @replies setting would likely be much higher than 3%. not exactly scientific but it would tell them more about how valuable the feature has become.
also, even if only 3% of your users are your "most active" users, do you really want to abruptly change the way they use your service? that 3% has likely made twitter into much of what it is today.
Michael Bauser
· 7 months ago
A logical person would have understood that the part of transaction with the highest server cost isn't based on the number of active users, it's based on the number of follower accounts. Every time somebody posed an @reply, Twitter had to check all of the poster's followers to see if they were an all-reply-enabled account, whether or not that account is "active". In the cost/benefit analysis, active and inactive users have the same cost. Therefore, the number of accounts is the more important number.
(Obscure irony: A lot of Twitter's inactive accounts are probably created by people who were invited by their nerd friends, followed their nerd friend, then stopped using Twitter. Twitter's most ardent evangelists may have contributed heavily to this problem.)
Miladinoski
· 7 months ago
Nevertheless, it was an option, IMO if only 1% of the users were using it they should've left it, I don't see how they help the community by removing something that is totally optional and not default - even if only the 'power' users would make use of this (which is not totally true in this situation)
Michael Bauser
· 7 months ago
You humble opinion betrays a deep ignorance about how captialisim works. Also, it shows that you still don't understand this is an engineering problem.
Sometimes, tech companies have to look at features of their products and decide if the return is worth the investment. Twitter had a feature that an overwhelming majority of its users don't use, that was taking up a disproportionate amount of engineering resources. They had to drop the feature, or reivent their architecture (apparently). They did a cost/benefit analysis, and decided dropping the feature was the smart thing to do.
That's life at a tech company. Sometimes you try an idea that sounds cool, it doesn't work out, and you drop it. If companies felt obligated to provide enternal support for features that on 2-3% users ended up using, it would discourage innovation, because management wouldn't want to greenlight as many new ideas. There has to be room for failure to encourage innovation.
Listen, I agree that it sucks when a website loses a feature you like. (Facebook does it to me a lot.) But I understand why it happens, and I see why Twitter did what it did. At this point, everybody who uses an assinine phrase like "in my opinion" and "even if only 2% used it" is just being oblivious, or throwing a tantrum.
Tyler Hayes
· 7 months ago
The sooner they come out with this supposed new-fangled feature, the better.
That's awesome that they came out with a better reply. Good for them. But that's not truly what made people angry.
As with most services (especially online ones), I'd imagine that those 3% of people who did use the feature were putting out 99% of the material on Twitter. As most online services go, there's the "80/20" rule, and on Twitter it looks like it's more like "97/3" now. I mean, #fixreplies even made it to the top trending topic position within hours of this happening. What does that tell us? That the true Influencers of Twitter's userbase were the ones who used this feature, so Twitter was pissing off its most loyal users. Would have been nice for Biz Stone to address this.
Coralie
· 7 months ago
I also agree with your comment about the smaller percentage using it more fully. I appreciate the apology, though. Let's hope a better solution isn't too far away.
Will Mueller
· 7 months ago
Agreed! The community should have had some more notice and something at least asking the users about the change BEFORE it happens.
douglaspaul
· 7 months ago
great point. i'm still pissed. my timeline is basically a ghosttown. argh!! i don't appreciate this "apology" or "explanation."
Brian
· 7 months ago
Does the 97% include the users who don't return after a month?
Perhaps inactive accounts should automatically stop following others after 6 months of inactivity, reducing the load.
I hope the new feature allows me to decide on a user-by-user basis whose @replies I see.
unmarketing
· 7 months ago
Yep, such a different way this would of went down if they went with the scalability issue from the get-go.
Saying you've change a "little used" function, even at 3%, hits over 200,000 users, most that used that function are active users, vs the dormant accounts, IMHO.
I for one didn't use this function, since it was going to add a huge amount of tweets in the main stream for me of a lot of "LOL!!" and "Thanks!" between two people. I still say it's more useful and focused for people not to use this function of saying "all @ replies" but understand the reasons why some ppl choose to use them
AlexSchleber
· 7 months ago
Now you disappoint me, Scott Stratten (@unmarketing). You didn't want to see what your closest 25k friends were writing to others? :)
(Ironically the larger your following/follower set gets for someone such as yourself, the larger the % of @ reply tweets that will surface in your timeline even with the default setting.)
I am now seeing A LOT less of you, is that truly what you are arguing for? See, I used to click through a lot of your little "Well played Sir!" and "...and by XYZ, I mean..." type @ reply banter with peeps. Most of it is GONE now... If anything, Twitter should be integrating MORE conversation threading/visibility into the platform, not less. It already works on Search.twitter.com, so what gives?
The point is, it's better to have access to the full data set (which should also be less expensive database lookup-wise), and then filter down from there as you see fit. Twitter's spirit is openness (maybe a lot more open than its founders foresaw), why deny access to an entire class of Tweets out of hand?
BTW, I find Mashable's lauding here of Twitter's apology as "frank and honest" almost as Orwellian as Twitter's language in all of this from the get-go. They (Biz, et al.) still continue to try (rather clumsily) to tell us what to think. Propaganda that can easily be spotted is... 2nd rate propaganda.
Also agree with people further down that the 3% of users number feels "massaged". If it were % of active users it should be a good bit higher. Don't trust any statistic you haven't forged yourself...
Twitter @replies and #fixreplies issue is why Tawk exists. Twitter is messaging, Tawk is conversations. Check it: http://tawk1.com/94
Rincewind42
· 7 months ago
Although only "3% of Twitter users were making use of the advanced Twitter @replies feature", long tail demographics probably apply to twitter users. So my guess is that that 3% made up 97% of all twitter activity. The other 97% are the inactive or marginally active twitter masses. Judging from my twitter stream, everyone who regularly uses twitter was narked and those who rarely post didn't notice.
KayDub
· 7 months ago
- Not sure how you make a design that's easier to filter, than to unfilter, remarkable architecture they've come up with. Thank goodness I can still read things the old way using FriendFeed! - 97% of people didn't _change_ _the_ _default_. Color me surprised! What percentage of the "3%" are active users, rather than viewers? Am I suppose to feel better because I, and it appears >50% of my twitter buds are in the minority? Instead I'm now posting to multiple services, like identi.ca, while Twitter goes wherever it's going. - Glad they appear to have come clean, but companies shouldn't remove features, with the promise of "we'll replace it something better someday". First you design and test the replacement functionality, then you remove the old, basic product rollout 101.
Kamanu
· 7 months ago
I WANT MY @reply options back. I was a part of that 3%. Gah
steelhoof
· 7 months ago
I had a feeling it had more to do with server loading and bandwidth.
S
· 7 months ago
Thank goodness they're not making any money. Because it's this kind of 'owner do everything' strategy that loses companies money. This woulnd't have happened if they had someone in Communication.
Stephen Hultquist
· 7 months ago
I don't buy it. Of course there might have been a technical issue, but I don't buy that they couldn't revert it for a week or two while they work out a real fix. If it's only 3% of Twitter users, use a hash of those Twitter user names against the folks they follow. There are certainly options to fix this pretty quickly, and words like "technical issue" may placate the less technical among us, but those who understand these things will recognize the equivocation.
And tomorrow is Friday... Think about #followfriday for a minute. Anyone who normally would start their post with @user is screwed. No one will see that post tomorrow.
It was a good move to admit they erred, but they erred on multiple levels, and they haven't really fixed anything.
ryancoleman
· 7 months ago
"And tomorrow is Friday... Think about #followfriday for a minute. Anyone who normally would start their post with @user is screwed. No one will see that post tomorrow."
Almost no one would have seen it before the switch. People who were starting follow friday tweets with @'s clearly didn't get how twitter works from the get-go...
lalunablanca
· 7 months ago
I don't buy it either. Having managed numerous web-app-dev projects over the years, something isn't adding up here. There is more to this story. Their last three blog posts have a HUGE "spin" odor.
Mayank
· 7 months ago
SO he says we are not getting that feature back? Even if that 3% was enough to get "#fixreplies" to be trending within hours of this change? I was a part of that 3%, and I want my replies to work like they did before this stupid change. Makes no sense, why doesnt twitter want me to do what it is meant for, interaction,conversations and meeting new people.
Michael Bauser
· 7 months ago
That's what you think Twitter is meant for. Twitter is going to design for what they think Twitter is meant for.
There's a whole lot of people in this discussion who haven't figured out that not everybody thinks like them.
Bill Sodeman
· 7 months ago
Twitter's management needs adult supervision.
Billy Dennis
· 7 months ago
This is the problem with this post: Did Twitter go back to the way it was? Yes or no? Am I NOW going to be able to see the @replies being made by the people I follow? I could NOT care less if OTHER people do not want to see them. I want to see them. If others do not want to see their followers replies, the don't follow them.
Steve
· 7 months ago
What do I think? I think removing the feature is pretty idiotic ... watching other peoples' conversations is an important part of what is useful about Twitter. Really, showing @replies should be the default. Make it show for everybody if they want to get rid of the option, rather than showing nobody.
zimzum
· 7 months ago
I'm still flabbergasted that they
1. Changed something without consulting people, dissing it as being "small" and "undesirable" even if 100,000 people explicitly decided to use it 2. Tried to cover it up with excuses 3. Provided no real answer to what they'll do next. Notice they say 'the use case...will return' but not that we'll actually *be able to read what people write* plain and simple. Sounds like a cop-out for the "contact discovery" feature they want to introduce.
An excuse is the least I expect. This is not what they've supplied. It's just a compilation of their non-replies and more, basically calling me an idiot by using the feature, as if I "didn't understand" what was it about.
Call me a jaded user complaining about something that's free, but up until now they had my utmost respect and trust, something I don't easily 'give' to a startup. That has been lost.
LadyWrites
· 7 months ago
"This is a smart and necessary move by Twitter() that will no doubt ease tensions in the community." This statement is patently false and non-realistic. Just look at the posts pertaining to #fixreplies and try to repeat the statement truthfully. As to having discussions with users that made them think it was a good thing to do? Again, check out how many people are upset over it. I think that leaves a very, very small percentage who it was discussed with. I do, however, agree that the information on the feature was sketchy so not everyone could understand which option to use. If it was placing a burden on the system, it was being implemented incorrectly.
So, thanks, Twitter developers, for successfuly pissing off MOST of your users while making your program boring. You also succeeded in following in Facebook's footsteps: taking a highly successful site, arbitrarily changing successful features and annoying people.
ECS Dave
· 7 months ago
While I appreciate the "effort" made to mollify the "power users" by Mr. Stone, I still am reading that the twitter we knew, is gone... and still suggest folks go to the GetSatisfaction website to continue the discussion - http://gsfn.us/t/6g7y and retweet the url to their followers...
I'm really glad they posted this explanation. However, I'm uncertain about the future: I like seeing "all the tweets" those I'm following send out, just because I use twitter to see what's going on in their world. I really hope Twitter will offer that option, but I'm afraid they might not, because they're so focused on "@replies to non-followees as a means of discovery of new people".
To me, "show me @replies only if I follow the person they're sent to" is artificial, and I don't like it at all.
jasonn
· 7 months ago
I'm late to the conversation, but it's absolutely amazing to me that tech investors and administrators don't take a page from this history book and change their behavior patterns... well, I say amazing. What I mean is to say it's amazing that I know this won't change anything.
In order for Twitter's architecture to have an inability to store a single YES/NO feature with relatively cheap overhead it's got to be absolutely broken. Twitter's volume of text messaging is huge, but the tasks are relatively simple. And, this particular task is extremely simple. If it is in fact crippling, and I take Twitter at their word, this is mindbogglingly bad. Only, it's a trend.
Todd Holmes
· 7 months ago
Wow lots of YouTube-level commentary here. This explanation seems perfectly reasonable, and the fact that they're working to restore the functionality means we'll have back what we're all wanting.
It's understandable that Twitter's explosive growth would uncover kinks in the way things were implemented when the service was much smaller, and implementing new hacks to fix it as some of you have suggested is a laughable solution. I have more faith in the Twitter team to come up with workable, scalable solution than all of the armchair programmers who say it should be an easy fix.
And for those of you are giving up on Twitter and switching over to Facebook, good riddance.
Michael
· 7 months ago
While I find it hard to believe that only 3% of users utilize the @reply feature, perhaps that number is so small because of the ridiculous influx of celebrity Twitter followers, what isn't clear is if it will be put back or not. As almost every one of us early and power Twitter users has told Twitter, this particular feature is how our networks have grown, which in turn is how Twitter has grown. If Twitter is not going to give back the feature, then our networks will become stagnant as we won't grow them without knowing who to Follow. #followfriday and #newbietuesday help, but it's really about finding interesting people from seeing part of an interesting conversation, not just being told someone is cool. That's fine for Ellen, Oprah, @aplusk, and @mrskutcher, but how about those whose conversations are the real value of Twitter? Once more: it's about the content, but this change in functionality is now hiding that content.
spryka
· 7 months ago
I just got a copy of http://ePostMailer.com and I would recommend to anyone who needs to send out an opt-in email mailshot. Its the best free desktop based email marketing software I have used so far.
jasonn
· 7 months ago
How many software developers think filtering replies vs. NOT filtering replies SHOULD be exponentially simpler.
Edward G. Talbot
· 7 months ago
I highly doubt twitter will lose many people over this. This latest post rings very true to me as an IT person.
The thing that jumps out at me is their continued insistence that this was confusing. maybe it was, but reworking Help and Settings pages certainly could have fixed that, so I just don't buy it as a legitimate reason to make the change. Specifically, they said
"People would change the setting and then not understand why their timeline had fragments of conversations." I think this is very misleading. I think it's a lot more likely that new users to twitter didn't understand the fragments. I know it took me a week or two to start understanding the flow. I have serious trouble buying that twitter users other than new/infrequent users went to the trouble of changing the setting AND then were confused. So this seems to me to be a new user help/introduction problem.
" From the tweet author perspective, there was an unclear expectation as to who would actually see messages which often lead to trepidation when it came to using replies." Twitter users need to be totally clear that unless their updates are protected or they are sending a DM, ANYONE can see them. Period. That includes non-twitter users. Operating under any other assumption is ridiculous and twitter could rectify this by making this clear. Don't put anything into your stream that you wouldn't want broadcast everywhere.
" Finally, even folks who understood the setting would complain that they couldn’t follow accounts with a high volume of replies because the replies overwhelmed their timeline." This is the most ridiculous one. They could have changed the setting! You're saying they understood it, so they would know what to do. Now maybe they're upset because they only want to see @replies for some people but not others? Ok, well the solution didn't fix that and probably pissed them off as well.
I love twitter. I have no plans to stop using it even if they kept the change. and I certainly don't have any vitriol towards the people who made the decisions. But I hope they understand that the "design" reasons for the change simply don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny as justification. Better to just stop citing them.
Micah
· 7 months ago
I think all you TWEETHEADS are people that believe you are smarter than everyone else. Your arrogance is appalling! You guys have no real value add to society as a whole. The company screwed up and did what most companies do not do...and that is state they screwed up and are actively fixing the problem.
Who cares what the issue was; they are fixing it. So get off all of your tweet boxes and get real jobs!!
spryka
· 7 months ago
Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.
Being one of the 3% who used the feature, I miss it a lot. I miss seeing the tweets of various celebrities I follow that aren't directed to me, and it's going to be very annoying having to check all of their pages daily now for updates I've missed because they didn't show up on my time line.
Bizmeister
· 7 months ago
I guess I'm one of the 3%. I just want to reiterate that it makes it almost moot to follow "celeb" tweeters now bc followers will no longer be able to read answers to questions from fans posted by celebs (unless they RT). It's been great being able to follow conversations between people and this is no longer possible. I have defintely expanded my twitter networks by reading a reply and thinking "oh! I didn't know he/she tweeted!" I hope a solution is found soon.
@DonnaMolinari
· 7 months ago
I think what they should have said was: the @reply was taking too much of a performance hit when it had to check all of the followers for the user and if many people were doing this at the same time I can see it brings the network and web server to it's knees.. As a QA engineer who has tested performance problems with web applications, I feel this is the issue. What is important to customers and end-users is 1) Performance and 2) UI.
Beth
· 7 months ago
I've read 2% of users, now 3%- I think the tech issue explanation was a quick excuse to cover the mistake they know they made. If the technical aspects of the coding were in such disarray, that should have been the first point addressed. Even as a blogger, if something technical causes delays for my readers, I address it first and foremost. Not to mention, if "only 3%" used the option, why such an outrage by the Twitter community?
Georgette Banker
· 7 months ago
THE TWITTER WHAT ARE YOU DOING SITE IS FUCKED UP IN SEVERAL WAYS!I SENT A COMMENT LAST NIGHT.IT ABVYOSLY BIDDENT GO THREW. THIS ONE HAD BETTER!I DONT WANT AN APPOLLIGY OR 2 CENTS.JUST FIX IT!
All Comments
Please get a room. Your crush on Twitter is getting out of hand. You are gushing. Enough already just fuck her would ya!
@at
http://bit.ly/confusion
Twitter uses a lot of unnecessary technicial jargon on their site and on their help pages. Doesn't really help.
"All @replies" sounded good. "No @replies" sounded scary. Why not call the three different modes more straight-forward things like "Quiet" "Standard" and "Noisy"?
And they should hire (more) user interface designers.
Let's see the the derivations that=3% guys. Otherwise, it's jsut more number juggling. How conveneint
Either you think Twitter is lying, you think Twitter can't form a dirt-simple databse quiery, or you think they can't do simple division. Or maybe you're just talking out of your ass. Which is it?
if twitter could query their db based on a minimum # of tweets sent to determine "active" users, the number who use the all @replies setting would likely be much higher than 3%. not exactly scientific but it would tell them more about how valuable the feature has become.
also, even if only 3% of your users are your "most active" users, do you really want to abruptly change the way they use your service? that 3% has likely made twitter into much of what it is today.
(Obscure irony: A lot of Twitter's inactive accounts are probably created by people who were invited by their nerd friends, followed their nerd friend, then stopped using Twitter. Twitter's most ardent evangelists may have contributed heavily to this problem.)
Sometimes, tech companies have to look at features of their products and decide if the return is worth the investment. Twitter had a feature that an overwhelming majority of its users don't use, that was taking up a disproportionate amount of engineering resources. They had to drop the feature, or reivent their architecture (apparently). They did a cost/benefit analysis, and decided dropping the feature was the smart thing to do.
That's life at a tech company. Sometimes you try an idea that sounds cool, it doesn't work out, and you drop it. If companies felt obligated to provide enternal support for features that on 2-3% users ended up using, it would discourage innovation, because management wouldn't want to greenlight as many new ideas. There has to be room for failure to encourage innovation.
Listen, I agree that it sucks when a website loses a feature you like. (Facebook does it to me a lot.) But I understand why it happens, and I see why Twitter did what it did. At this point, everybody who uses an assinine phrase like "in my opinion" and "even if only 2% used it" is just being oblivious, or throwing a tantrum.
That's awesome that they came out with a better reply. Good for them. But that's not truly what made people angry.
As with most services (especially online ones), I'd imagine that those 3% of people who did use the feature were putting out 99% of the material on Twitter. As most online services go, there's the "80/20" rule, and on Twitter it looks like it's more like "97/3" now. I mean, #fixreplies even made it to the top trending topic position within hours of this happening. What does that tell us? That the true Influencers of Twitter's userbase were the ones who used this feature, so Twitter was pissing off its most loyal users. Would have been nice for Biz Stone to address this.
Perhaps inactive accounts should automatically stop following others after 6 months of inactivity, reducing the load.
I hope the new feature allows me to decide on a user-by-user basis whose @replies I see.
Saying you've change a "little used" function, even at 3%, hits over 200,000 users, most that used that function are active users, vs the dormant accounts, IMHO.
I for one didn't use this function, since it was going to add a huge amount of tweets in the main stream for me of a lot of "LOL!!" and "Thanks!" between two people. I still say it's more useful and focused for people not to use this function of saying "all @ replies" but understand the reasons why some ppl choose to use them
(Ironically the larger your following/follower set gets for someone such as yourself, the larger the % of @ reply tweets that will surface in your timeline even with the default setting.)
I am now seeing A LOT less of you, is that truly what you are arguing for? See, I used to click through a lot of your little "Well played Sir!" and "...and by XYZ, I mean..." type @ reply banter with peeps. Most of it is GONE now... If anything, Twitter should be integrating MORE conversation threading/visibility into the platform, not less. It already works on Search.twitter.com, so what gives?
The point is, it's better to have access to the full data set (which should also be less expensive database lookup-wise), and then filter down from there as you see fit. Twitter's spirit is openness (maybe a lot more open than its founders foresaw), why deny access to an entire class of Tweets out of hand?
BTW, I find Mashable's lauding here of Twitter's apology as "frank and honest" almost as Orwellian as Twitter's language in all of this from the get-go. They (Biz, et al.) still continue to try (rather clumsily) to tell us what to think. Propaganda that can easily be spotted is... 2nd rate propaganda.
Also agree with people further down that the 3% of users number feels "massaged". If it were % of active users it should be a good bit higher. Don't trust any statistic you haven't forged yourself...
(Wrote a longer retort here:
http://alexschleber.posterous.com/my-comment-on...
)
- 97% of people didn't _change_ _the_ _default_. Color me surprised! What percentage of the "3%" are active users, rather than viewers? Am I suppose to feel better because I, and it appears >50% of my twitter buds are in the minority? Instead I'm now posting to multiple services, like identi.ca, while Twitter goes wherever it's going.
- Glad they appear to have come clean, but companies shouldn't remove features, with the promise of "we'll replace it something better someday". First you design and test the replacement functionality, then you remove the old, basic product rollout 101.
Because it's this kind of 'owner do everything' strategy that loses companies money.
This woulnd't have happened if they had someone in Communication.
And tomorrow is Friday... Think about #followfriday for a minute. Anyone who normally would start their post with @user is screwed. No one will see that post tomorrow.
It was a good move to admit they erred, but they erred on multiple levels, and they haven't really fixed anything.
Almost no one would have seen it before the switch. People who were starting follow friday tweets with @'s clearly didn't get how twitter works from the get-go...
There's a whole lot of people in this discussion who haven't figured out that not everybody thinks like them.
Really, showing @replies should be the default. Make it show for everybody if they want to get rid of the option, rather than showing nobody.
1. Changed something without consulting people, dissing it as being "small" and "undesirable" even if 100,000 people explicitly decided to use it
2. Tried to cover it up with excuses
3. Provided no real answer to what they'll do next. Notice they say 'the use case...will return' but not that we'll actually *be able to read what people write* plain and simple. Sounds like a cop-out for the "contact discovery" feature they want to introduce.
An excuse is the least I expect. This is not what they've supplied. It's just a compilation of their non-replies and more, basically calling me an idiot by using the feature, as if I "didn't understand" what was it about.
Call me a jaded user complaining about something that's free, but up until now they had my utmost respect and trust, something I don't easily 'give' to a startup. That has been lost.
So, thanks, Twitter developers, for successfuly pissing off MOST of your users while making your program boring. You also succeeded in following in Facebook's footsteps: taking a highly successful site, arbitrarily changing successful features and annoying people.
Be Well!
ECS Dave - http://twitter.com/ECS_Dave
To me, "show me @replies only if I follow the person they're sent to" is artificial, and I don't like it at all.
In order for Twitter's architecture to have an inability to store a single YES/NO feature with relatively cheap overhead it's got to be absolutely broken. Twitter's volume of text messaging is huge, but the tasks are relatively simple. And, this particular task is extremely simple. If it is in fact crippling, and I take Twitter at their word, this is mindbogglingly bad. Only, it's a trend.
It's understandable that Twitter's explosive growth would uncover kinks in the way things were implemented when the service was much smaller, and implementing new hacks to fix it as some of you have suggested is a laughable solution. I have more faith in the Twitter team to come up with workable, scalable solution than all of the armchair programmers who say it should be an easy fix.
And for those of you are giving up on Twitter and switching over to Facebook, good riddance.
The thing that jumps out at me is their continued insistence that this was confusing. maybe it was, but reworking Help and Settings pages certainly could have fixed that, so I just don't buy it as a legitimate reason to make the change. Specifically, they said
"People would change the setting and then not understand why their timeline had fragments of conversations."
I think this is very misleading. I think it's a lot more likely that new users to twitter didn't understand the fragments. I know it took me a week or two to start understanding the flow. I have serious trouble buying that twitter users other than new/infrequent users went to the trouble of changing the setting AND then were confused. So this seems to me to be a new user help/introduction problem.
" From the tweet author perspective, there was an unclear expectation as to who would actually see messages which often lead to trepidation when it came to using replies."
Twitter users need to be totally clear that unless their updates are protected or they are sending a DM, ANYONE can see them. Period. That includes non-twitter users. Operating under any other assumption is ridiculous and twitter could rectify this by making this clear. Don't put anything into your stream that you wouldn't want broadcast everywhere.
" Finally, even folks who understood the setting would complain that they couldn’t follow accounts with a high volume of replies because the replies overwhelmed their timeline."
This is the most ridiculous one. They could have changed the setting! You're saying they understood it, so they would know what to do. Now maybe they're upset because they only want to see @replies for some people but not others? Ok, well the solution didn't fix that and probably pissed them off as well.
I love twitter. I have no plans to stop using it even if they kept the change. and I certainly don't have any vitriol towards the people who made the decisions. But I hope they understand that the "design" reasons for the change simply don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny as justification. Better to just stop citing them.
Who cares what the issue was; they are fixing it. So get off all of your tweet boxes and get real jobs!!
KZ
http://ePostMailer.com