One of the big complaints about Twitter is that conversations are hard to follow. Users can write a response to a Twitter message (or anything else), but the easy way to do this is to add an @[username] tag to the Twitter, which refers back to the original Twitter user. But by then that original user has often moved on to other subjects, and it becomes impossible to follow the conversation.
This morning a new service launched called Tweetree that tries to solve this problem by threading conversations. It works, sort of, but there are occasional errors as the service tries to match up which messages refer to what, and it rarely tracks deeper than one comment. Hardly a conversation.
This was all tried before with a service called Quotably, which actually worked much better than Tweetree. Quotably is now sadly in the Deadpool. Quotably was a good way to track conversations on Twitter, but it too had its problems keeping up.
The fact is that Twitter purposefully doesn’t want users to be able to track conversations. The content begins and ends with a discreet Twitter message, up to 140 characters long. Competitor Friendfeed does a nice job of tracking conversations by letting users reply to actual messages, not just users. Twitter, for whatever reason (possibly to keep things simple), just doesn’t want that. And until they do, nothing is going to change.
Tweetree has other features, like embedding videos and pictures that people link to into the stream. But without proper conversation tracking it won’t gather more than a handful of users, and will soon be forgotten.
I think twitter should take a look at Plurk for the way they thread new “plurks” or the equivalence of “tweets”. All replies to that topic are kept IN that topic.
A major nuisance now is that all your replies to go everyone following both of you. If you really try and get “engaged” you’ll turn off as many people as you reply to by flooding their streams with useless @replies like @yoblow totally see you there! @janedow I know what you mean!!
Yet if you don’t do similar things it’s as though you are ignoring people. Can’t win with current setup unless you heavily use DM which is less sincere to some extent…
Cool topic.
I like Plurk’s threading, but I hate its amateurish feel. Artificial karma and proprietary markup just feel so kiddie.
I hear you. It’s also really hard to “get going” that said I do LOVE plurk. Heck I even write or used to on plurkable.com
http://plurkabl...asual-plurkers/
There in July I ranted about how the Karma system is a turn off. Another issue which should be addressed IMO is if someone sends a private message exclusively to 1 user; they should get an email notification.
It’s too bad because Plurk is the ultimate “real time” conversation platform I’ve found. Twitter has its limitations and more of a broadcast station. Let’s see how this new app changes things.
Thing is you will still probably flood your friends feeds if you reply too much which is anti-social imo.
Hit it right on the nail! Plurk is so .
That’s the main reason I left Plurk, the Karma was a waste of time. Especially seeing how people would Spam just to get it.
I agree. I have been using plurk since June and ever since my twitter exposure has dwindled significantly. The timeline, conversation windows…. forget the Karma bit, the functionality is exactly what someone like me was asking for. Multiple conversation threads that remain packaged together.
“…it too had it’s problems keeping up.”
its its its!
This drives me nuts. The WSJ mixed up its and it’s this week. Where are the copy editors?
Ouch! Such a smackdown of Tweetree, despite some people I know on Twitter tweeting about how great it is. Personally, I dislike the fact that Twiter and Tweetree don’t auto-refresh (yes I know there’s probably some greasemonkey script for that). Also I didn’t realize how shallow the discussion tracking with Tweetree was, I thought it was better.
The fix for this for most people is to use a firefox plugin called reloadevery. Just go to http://mozilla.org and get this extension and you’ll be able to autorefresh the tweetree page.
Actually, I’m pretty sure the enhancement Fred Wilson is talking about in his comment on the original post (the one that started this thread) is threading. A few months back Twitter added it to their API, why would they do that unless they planned to use the data? Shortly after adding it @ev said in a post that he was using a new UI and liked it. Fred says that some of the features in Tweetree are in the new UI and some aren’t. As a veteran tea-leave reader my guess is that the ones they have are the threading features and the ones they don’t are the image inclusion.
http://www.scri...7/tweetree.html
For me, being able to see the graphics and videos inline is a big deal. I think it will be for users too. I don’t really care about threading, I don’t think of Twitter as a conversational medium.
Thank you Dave. My feelings exactly. I could care less about conversations, the inline media is what keeps me coming back.
facebooks implementation of status and comments on status is wonderful, complete with mobile versions.
I think facebook could put a hurting on twitter If they allowed clean urls and opened the walled status garden (a little more)
Although conversations happen all the time on Twitter I am not sure that was the original intent of the medium – that is what IM programs are for.
However, I also understand that many technologies get used for things other than their original intent and in that case the technology must evolve!
It looks like Tweetree has beat Twitter to the punch on this now.
Is their a website that has a list of all the twitter plugins with simple descriptions of each?
I think you meant “discrete”, not “discreet”. Copy editing FTW. Other than that, nice reminder about Quotably.
Isn’t it intentional to keep twitter usage fast-paced, instead of allowing people to stop, look, and converse at a tweet like yet another forum? “Tweet and move on”.
At some point a tweet should lead to something deeper..
Visitors or the initiators should have this option to either just scratch the surface and move on or dig deep in to the topics. The conversations can be better controlled. The present feature looks amateurish.
Twitter may want to encourage long threads because it’s too much like IM and can alienate others.
On the other hand, I was at a Tweet Up in Cambridge Ma last month, and the guy from Twitter (I cannot remember his name) said they are rolling out threaded conversations next year.
We’ll see.
Michelle, this is what I am refering to below (sorry missed your comment before I wrote it). They have the ability to do it now, it’s simply a UI issue now which I’m sure they are working on.
CORRECTION: Twitter may NOT want to…
It’s not true that Twitter don’t want you to track conversations. there is a parameter in the API (in_reply_to_status_id) which allows Tweets to be linked by reply. Of course that is as long as the user clicks on reply to a specific Tweet and not just type in @name. However the fact that this exists would suggest that Twitter have no problem with tracking conversations.
So I’m not sure what TweetTree are using but with this parameter the should be no problem matching up which comments refer to what.
No offense, but conversations wasn’t Twitter’s original intent. Short microblogged bursts was. If you want to conduct conversations, there’s already tons of software out there for doing that. Why make Twitter into something it wasn’t meant to be?
Services evolve based on what users desire…smart companies evolve to keep users attention. Someone might say something interesting…something that makes you think and you want to talk about it futher..perhaps a way to have tweets link into reply groups, where people click an icon and can talk more freely about things. It wouldn’t be something for a SMS but it would be more for the online user..
Yes there is other software to do this but so what…people don’t like using a million different services…
I used to own http://tweader.com, and I still find it a great way to track Twitter conversations.
I don’t find it particularly difficult to follow conversations, provided that people have replied to specific tweets on Twitter. A while back I tried out a greasemonkey script that threaded conversations for you on the Twitter page, and *that*surprisingly, I found more confusing to use.
If you manually reply to a message, you’ll lose the context. If you use the Web Interface and hit the reply button next to a tweet, it passes the original message ID to the tweet form so that the reply context is maintained.
“The fact is that Twitter purposefully doesn’t want users to be able to track conversations. The content begins and ends with a discreet Twitter message, up to 140 characters long. Competitor Friendfeed does a nice job of tracking conversations by letting users reply to actual messages, not just users. Twitter, for whatever reason (possibly to keep things simple), just doesn’t want that. And until they do, nothing is going to change.”
Two things wrong with that paragraph…
1. Twitter DOES allow you to reply to specific messages. It shows up on a tweet as “in reply to” referring to that specific message, on various applications. So you can click back and see which message it is referring to rather easily.
and
2. Twitter’s very own search function allows you to track conversations by entering the @ symbol with the name of the user in your search. Then when you see “show conversation” on a tweet, it reproduces the entire thing right there.
Go back a page or two on TechCrunch’s own twitter account, and you can see an example of this ‘conversation’ feature.
http://search.t...q=%40techcrunch
I used tweetree and I found it quite useful.But I hope that twitter.com itself would add the missing feature.
I hope Twitter continues to discourage conversations, at least until their primary UI and that of most clients hides conversations by default. Here’s why:
What I use Twitter for is a quick check on what people who I care about or find interesting are up to. I pop it open, read the top of the stack, and move along. If I miss some, I miss some.
When somebody has a conversation, especially a long one, a) usually they’re the only ones who care, b) it kills the high signal/noise ratio in my client, and c) now if I just read the front page and move along, I may get nothing out of it.
What I tell pals just getting started with Twitter is that they should use direct messages or some other medium entirely if they want to have a conversation. If it ends up so interesting they think their audience would care to read it, they can blog the transcript and link to it on Twitter.
Thanks for the write-up Mike. I just wanted to point out that Tweetree by default only shows one post back when a post is a reply. If the original post is a reply as well, there is a link to view the full conversation which pulls in up to 10 posts back up the tree.
We designed it this way so that it wouldn’t be too cluttered when you first load your stream, but that you have the option to view the full conversation if you want to.
We are always open to suggestions on how to improve this, though, and we have a feedback forum setup at http://tweetree.uservoice.com if anyone is interested in helping us.
Thanks!
John Fredrickson
Draconis Software
About Quotably…if you’re a company that is about to get dead-pooled, please figure out a way to release all the code under a Free Software license. Stop forcing your users to switch services and to lose all their data because you’ve decided to stop working on your hobby project or you’ve run out of cash :-/
Rudolf, I do intend to release the Quotably code one of these days (honestly, though, it’s not like it’s a whole lot of special code and it’s mostly useless now due to the limitations imposed by Twitter). I agree about preventing data loss, but really there was no user data stored in Quotably (it was all stored at Twitter) so I’m not sure what you mean in this case.
-Ben
its actually there,
taken from api docs
in_reply_to_status_id. Optional. The ID of an existing status that the status to be posted is in reply to. This implicitly sets the in_reply_to_user_id attribute of the resulting status to the user ID of the message being replied to. Invalid/missing status IDs will be ignored.
Also the search already shows conversations too.
The issue with threaded conversations isn’t that twitter does not allow it but people with private statuses on so it makes life difficult.
Following a conversation all the way through has always been my biggest pain with Twitter, most of the what it’s used for today wasn’t intended in it’s original usability.
For those who’ve been following me on Twitter and every other social media outlet, you may have see me post about http://www.hypick.com – Hype a Topic a new site I’m about to launch very soon. Hypick fills this very basic problem. Your comments and posts become much more of a conversation, rather than shouts. Making them so much more useful.
Sign up for the beta invite today – http://www.hypick.com
I don’t think anyone really keeps track of the tweets. Nor is twitter really made to have a conversation.
This is the one major reason why I prefer Jaiku. Whatever anyone might say about the differences in models, I just prefer being able to respond properly to comments.
Just use friendfeed already if you want to do input anything in the box other than the answer to “what are you doing?”
Brightkite does threaded conversations and allows you to subscribe to them so that you get notified (by email or sms) when the convo is updated.
I have had the need to use Twitter but have always been interested in Web technologies and how I can improve my own websites.
It so happens that I have been working on Questioon.com my own website designed to meet the needs of those that want to be able to conversate in. Tweet like fashion. A sort of cross between Twitter, yahoo answers, facebook and google.
Really? Conversate? Could they just converse instead? Why don’t you make it a cross between Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Facebook, Google, Myspace, a 21″ CRT, and a bag of fertilizer. And blow yourself off the face of the earth.
I receive the majority of replies to my Twitter status updates via Facebook, actually. Ever since they added commenting to stories there, I’ve barely even looked again at Friendfeed.
Keep an eye out for ‘twittorum’ (Twitter forum) with full threading trees of the whole conversations – based around the powerful data structures within Phreadz – but using Twitter accounts and the Twitter API.
It shouldn’t take too long to build, given what I’ve already knocked out there.
Also, I’ve been meaning to pull more Twitter-powered integration in to Phreadz, making it a worthwhile project.
Yes. Thread those twitter tweets. Glad to see people are working together in such a massive collaborative effort. I can die in peace now knowing that the human race has solved all the earth’s really important problems. By the way, all of you go outside and take a look around before the next big earthquake swallows you up. And when it does, be sure you tweet each other that you are being eaten by the San Andreas fault.
Yeah, I’ve got the same problem. Since I am not twitting very much, I am able to get back, and then, go forward from back (!), to check whether any response has been made to my twittes or not. That’s still pretty sucking!
Just a spelling correction: “tweet” not “twitte”
Sorry…
It isn’t theoretically possible to track twitter conversations unless twitter allows you to reply to a particular tweet-id say @12345 or something. Even then the problem won’t be solved because if 3 people did @12345 and somebody shows the threaded replies, there will be a context mismatch..Do I make sense ?
Mayank,
Twitter does let you do this now. They added the field ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ to the API not so long ago
We’ve seen conversations spark up in Koornk, so we made a nice little feature to help get the context of the reply, also using the in_reply_to_status_id, that Twitter also has.
And some other UI ideas… Check out http://is.gd/ea74
also check out http://twitchboard.com; handy for routing your tweets.
I think you meant “discrete”, not “discreet”. Copy editing FTW. Other than that, nice reminder about Quotably.
With http://taweet.com you can add comments similar to Facebook and they are all synced back to Twitter.