I’ve been on Twitter since February of 2007 and it has become a great tool for me to meet new people all over the world. One of the ways that I do that is by looking at who other people ‘follow’ and at @reply conversations that are occurring on Twitter. Recently Twitter instituted a change that will make that more difficult or at least less effective.
The initial statement on the Twitter blog explaining the change was:
We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.
Here is an excerpt from Techcrunch that does a little bit better explanation of the change:
The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with.
But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it.
This caused quite a backlash on Twitter and lead to some eventual backpedaling by @biz and the Twitter team.
So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.
Now at this point I was thinking that it was awfully dumb for Twitter to remove this feature and cause such a big ruckus so I dug a little deeper. I was wondering if there was a solid engineering reason as to why they made the change. After a few Google searches I came across this very good explanation at Dare Obasajo’s blog. The important thing here is the update at the bottom of the post.
Without making this too technical it seems that the @reply feature as it was implemented was simply not going to scale well. With users like @aplusk, @TheEllenShow, or @oprah the amount of overhead on the system when they reply to someone is huge. This alone would not be a problem but when you aggregate with all the other users with 2k, 5k, or 10k followers it could bog the system down until it becomes unmanageable.
My personal opinion is that I liked the feature and was one of the 3% of users who actually used it. I think they should find a more scalable way to make the feature work and bring it back.
What do you think? Were you even aware the feature existed until it was removed? If so, did you use it? Leave your comments below and tell me what you think.
Christopher Johnston (@chrisjohnston) is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.
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In my experience, though I do not remember the exact time frame I noticed it, I found that I could see some @replies to people I did not follow, but not all. I also discovered other Twitter users that way. I’ve never noticed the option to alter the @replies option.
As for those, especially of the celebrity status, with extraordinarily high volumes of followers and especially where the follower count well exceeds the following count by giant proportions, perhaps @replies directed to them (though not @mentions) could be turned off (except to the sender and recipient). In many cases these would not constitute a conversation since those types of @replies are typically one way.
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I have found many people I want to follow this way. It doesn’t make since as a social network to get rid of it. I understand how it creates a horrible situation for them technically, but I do believe they can figure a better solution out.
Not to mention how many followers I get by replying to others and having to cross over so many accounts.
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I’ve found a lot of new people to follow by simply tracking conversations through @replies–much like following links on web pages. But now that the number of people I follow is rather large, I have a hard time keeping up with the updates appearing in my stream. If they included messages directed at still other users, I would quickly become overwhelmed.
Thanks for this article. I’ve been following this, too and since I’m the “Twitter Pro” at a company nearing its 100-year anniversary, I had summarized it like this: Twitter has been going through some enormous growing pains this month because of Ashton Kutcher, Oprah and so on with so many new users coming on that they their equipment must be overtaxed and they are probably scaling as fast as they can to meet demand. Well, getting rid of this serendipitous feature will certainly cut back enormous amounts of traffic (would love to know a percent figure), and I certainly hadn’t thought about what would happen if someone like Ashton Kutcher started making public replies creating massive new followings, but this move was just plain dumb.
Anyone who understands the nature of expansion and contraction knows that contraction (this move by Twitter) is self-defeating. Twitter is simply going to become as invisible as a platform unless they expand immediately by integrating all of these other tools such as scheduling tweets, distributing tweets to Facebook, MySpace, etc., directly linking with WordPress and so on. The demand that they started experiencing was because they have a great service and if you’re the next Google, you run down to the store and buy a truckload of services and pay consultants to hook ‘em up and bring on more brainiacs to figure out how to expand with the new success you are experiencing.
Contraction will kill a business at the moment it is poised to be launched into the stratosphere. After you have left the launchpad, you don’t dump your fuel!
Thanks for the info and I hope my contribution helps.