Comments on: Twitter Changes Replies Then Reconsiders

By: Joseph Dowdy

Joseph Dowdy — Sun, 24 May 2009 07:15:06 +0000

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.

By: Cindy Bidar

Cindy Bidar — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:50:32 +0000

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.

By: Val

Val — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:13:00 +0000

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. Vals last blog post..Mom Chats Open House

By: Christy

Christy — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:00:07 +0000

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. Christys last blog post..WordWorld: Flying Ant DVD Review