Twitter is officially getting dumbed down.
For the second time in less than two months, Twitter has changed its @reply system, this time by removing an option that has existed for many months in an effort to appease confused newcomers.
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.
From the Twitter blog:
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.
Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update.
Gee, thanks Twitter. I didn’t realize that an option I manually activated was undesirable. Any other things I shouldn’t like that you’d like to make me aware of?
If there was anything undesirable about the old system, it was that Twitter did a poor job of explaining it, not that the functionality itself was unwanted. And given that the option was not the default and was buried under a settings menu, why would it matter anyway? If too many people are getting confused, why not simply make it more hidden (perhaps under an ‘advanced’ tab)?
In the months since Twitter has grown in mainstream appeal, and especially since it made its debut on Oprah, some of Twitter’s early adopters have expressed fear over a change in the service. With a growing number of celebrities and media presences (not to mention spammers), they worry that the service will lose its tight-knit feel. Before tonight I never paid much attention to this train of thought – after all, on Twitter, I can just follow the people I care about and ignore those I don’t. But it’s clear that Twitter is concerned with appealing to a more mainstream audience, and if that takes making a very simple service even more simple, then by golly, that’s what they’re going to do.
Update 1: Many Twitter users are up in arms about the change, voicing their complaints under the channel #fixreplies, which is currently the top trending term on Twitter.
Update 2: Twitter CEO Evan Williams just tweeted about the change: “Reading people’s thoughts on the replies issue. We’re considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.”
So many changes this past week.
Whoa…
http://www.wannadevelop.com
Twitter is actually more complex than originally thought. Now what they link and what they not.
Instead they could change color of @ sign to light gray, so as to make for a sweet read of a tweet.
Jason may be you might want to try out http://www.wallpipe.com (launched today) since there you see comments in a more organized way.
But why can’t Twitter just do anything right THEMSELVES? Suzy Oprahwatcher isn’t going to know she has to go to “WallPipe.com” for this and download something called “Twhirl” for something else. So stupid.
Twitter needs to start listening or they’re going to lose they’re momentum.
Please sign my #fixreplies #twitterfail petition here so they get the message that their core users are NOT pleased:
http://bit.ly/fixtwitter
“considering alternatives”? not necessary, dude. just switch it back to how it was before.
Does this mean we can no longer turn the mainstream on and off….say it ain’t so….
God in heaven, please have a professional graphics designer do something about your website. I almost had a seizure when I inadvertently clicked on the link.
Agreed; there’s nowhere near enough blink and marquee tags being used there.
I do try not to be my old tech-elitist self too often but in all honesty; What do you expect Twitter to do when 80% of new users are signing-up when Oprah ends?
Waiting for the ‘Twitter Remote’ and the TweeVee-Guide to show up in news stands.
Daniel
https://spideroak.com – Free Cross-Platform Online Backup and Smart File & Folder Sync
still talking about twitter? isn’t there anything better to write about? if not, it’s a bad sign of the times…
This news is actually pretty significant and I suspect there will be an extended backlash against the change.
monger go away. Let TC decide what to post.
I made a petition about it: http://www.peti...l/petition.html I really hope they’ll listen to the community on this.
http://www.snop...on/internet.asp
Yup,
After the retweet button petition, let us see what comes out of this…
Try http://twitzap.com (runs best on Safari or Chrome). I am a satisfied user.
Even still, TC is definitely reaching the point where its covering Twitter entirely too often. If it is absolutely necessary to cover every change in the Twitter’s service as well as every startup built on top of it (including when they acquire one another), can you at least increase coverage of other topics/startups? That way readers such as myself don’t feel like 75% of your posts are about the same thing…
I mean, I definitely think Twitter is interesting, but I’m having a bit of Twitter overload. I’ve never been a big GigaOm reader, but I’ve been finding myself visiting everyday just to get tech news not related to Twitter..
GigaOm is doing quite good. And TC is Twitter-addict. I wonder why MG is not doing this post, probably he has gone to visit Evan Williams in person to discuss on the TC-via-Twitter marketing strategy.
Yeah I just got back. We decided on a 200% increase in Twitter story output for readers.
Here’s my take on this whole train wreck :
“Dear @ev and @biz: You’ve killed Twitter’s incredibly useful and powerful “Cocktail Party Effect”" – http://ping.fm/UBoPC
What’s ironic is that at the O’Reilly Social Web Foo Camp we were raving about how Twitter was not like Facebook when making design decisions.
Boy were we wong.
There is better stuff to write about. I’ve seen several worthy startups that deserve or could use some press. TechCrunch chooses not to cover it.
Irony. The stream of complains about too much twitter coverage is becoming a noise by itself.
I’d like to officially complain about this noise.
+1
+2
+3
so much Twitter spam today
Well, this makes it official, Twitter is interested in reaching the masses.
The early adopters who are using Twitter since 2006 should filter the noise even more with so many newbies and spammers invading the service.
The same thing happened with the Web when services like Geocities, or more recently Blogger, made it easier for anybody to publish online.
I think the worst thing is that it won’t be consistent – it seems that @ replies in the middle of any Tweet will pass through from anyone you follow, whereas when it’s at the beginning of the tweet, if you don’t follow the target of the @ you won’t see it.
At least that’s what I gather from reading between the lines of their blog post.
Following @ replies from people I follow to others I do not is one of the primary methods I use to find new people I want to follow. As you suggest, this will likely affect this behaviour… but it’s hard to tell for sure based on the blog post announcing the change.
Well, exactly. I specifically chose to get the extra ‘noise’ because if I follow people, it’s because they’re interesting or relevant to me. Hence at least some of the people they’re talking to are highly likely to also be – it’s a trusted recommendation system.
Fixing something that ain’t broke is not the solution to a poorly explained function (and was it really THAT poorly explained? We all understood it, after all). Add tutorials, tidy up your settings etc, but don’t take away a choice.
While I’ve some sympathy with a website refusing to add a choice that it doesn’t believe would be useful, taking one away is bound to be greeted with disgruntled community members – and rightly so.
If I wanted to use a system that made it a pain in the ass to network and made my updates difficult to find, I’d just post all my statuses to Facebook instead. Sweet.
On the other hand, I’m sure if it became a big enough deal, some of the Twitter client developers would just use the API to circumvent this.
Time to head over to getsatisfaction and register concerns there..
Reminds me of the time they took away free SMS for a bunch of countries without prior warning..
Users are stupid and confused and don’t know what they want. Twitter knows better. . More power to the people, NOT!
Wait.. I don’t understand. From what I’ve interpreted it as: They took out @replies to other people being shown in your timeline.
WHY?! I LOVED THIS!!! I could SEE what people were saying! I could join in on the conversation! It was VERY interesting to read! And what about all of the RETWEETS?! AAAAAGH.
And if I misinterpreted, and they set it so that I can no longer change it to “@replies from only those that I’m following” and the default is now “@replies from everyone” I’m cool with that.
Just as a point of correction, because I’ve opened several other new Twitter accounts during the past year, the default during that time at least has been to mute ALL replies, and you had to opt in to following any of them at all. I can’t speak to what was the case prior to late 2007, but it has been that way since then.
And because I’ve seen this a lot as the conversation continues, it’s wrong to assume that all your followers saw all your replies.
I’m not saying I approve of Twitter’s decision to no longer allow us to customize this setting. I don’t like it at all. I just don’t appreciate the hot air, or as someone who had this setting enabled as my default anyway, feeling like I’m somehow a bad Twitter user because I wasn’t following all replies.
Of course, I’m protected these days, rarely follow people without some kind of introduction from them or another of my friends, and am generally tetchy anyway these days. But that’s part of the reason I run a separate public account now.
You know what Twitter? I am confused.
Confused as to why you make changes that dont benefit us, confused by the fact that you cant keep a site up for more than three hours at a time, and why you make changes (or “updates” as you call them) without consulting the end users.
Sean, you’re my hero! I totally agree. I find it so ironic how a community application has no idea HOW to communicate with its community. I was just in the Twitter stream and people are PISSED. Curious as to what will be the outcome. Glad I saw you here. I probably won’t see you on Twitter unless I’m follow you or vice-versa. Sillyness!
can’t keep the site up for more than three hours? welcome to last year, service hasn’t been an issue for quite some time.
I’m disappointed by this change, as it takes away from the freewheeling style of Twitter. Please change it back!
They most likely put this in place to temporarily alleviate scaling problems. If just one person who follows 5,000 people has this enabled, and each of those 5,000 replies at someone the user doesn’t follow every day, that’s an extra 5,000 messages that Twitter has to shuffle around.
Expect it to be back in a few weeks due to “popular demand,” but it will really just be the next step in their plan after they’ve solved the scaling issue behind it.
What Christopher said makes a lot more sense to me than Twitter’s ignorant blog post. However, I don’t anticipate this feature to be back any time soon.
I don’t know, they sound pretty serious about this.
Doug Williams from Twitter’s API team (http://twitter....atus/1781633831): it was quite evident by usage patterns. Considering lack of use equivalent to a vote, the user base was shouting, “we don’t need this”
Alex Payne, API lead (http://twitter....atus/1781746843): Numbers talk. People talk too, but numbers tend to lie less.
With what little information we have, I’d have to agree with Christopher.
Twitter just clawed back tons of processor power by preventing many passive tweets.
…alliteration?
I was just talking to @xentek, a web developer buddy of mine about this. I made the same statement you did, and he had the insight that the extra filtering required to implement this actually *increases* processor load. I thought about it again for a moment and realized he was right, but that twitter still takes a massive load off of their *network* by making these changes.
He might be a “web developer,” but he doesn’t think about databases enough. Here’s a list of database checks Twitter has do make every time you post an @reply:
1) Look up the user(s) replied/mentioned and make sure they’re not blocking you. If they aren’t blocking you, add the tweet to their incoming stream.
2) Look up every one of your followers to see if they’re following the person you replied to. If they are, add the tweet to their incoming stream.
3) Look up every one of your followers again, to see if their account is set to see all replies. If it is, add the tweet to their incoming stream.
(Actually, they might do #3 before #2, but that’s not important for the discussion here.)
The processor-killer is the fact that checks 2 and 3 have to be run against every follower you have. Everytime Ashton Kutcher posts an @reply, Twitter has to check 1 million follower accounts twice.
Twitter has almost halved the amount of database activity per tweet by getting rid a feature that was “successful” (in adding a tweet to a follower’s incoming feed) 2% of the time.
Given the increasing number of celebrity and corporate accounts w/ thousands of followers, I can understand the cost/benefit analysis behind Twitter’s decision.
Case in point, from the Twitter blog: “The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.”
Twitter’s move doesn’t really make any sense and it’s blog post is insulting. It’s dumb enough that I bet they change it back pretty soon.
Life around TechWreck headquarters..
“OMG OMG OMG OMG!! Twitter said something!!!!!! Fire up the blogs Martha we got some stuff to write about. Who cares if most of our articles are just regurgitating someone else’s news. We got bloggin’ to do old girl!”
Clearly you’ve been watching CrunchCam. That’s exactly what happens.
so what they want us to do now? just put the @userName and our gig on it?
Not a smart move.
CItySpeek always shows you the replies of your friends, to others. Go check it out.
Given that it’s not on by default, this sounds like they had technical problems with the feature and are shutting it off under the guise of making things “easier”…
The funny/sad thing is that the “Tips” column next to the former location of the Replies setting still makes reference to it and links to a help page about it.
http://msittig....ter-replies.png
I’m glad there aren’t already a hundred different posts on this topic flooding my FriendFeed
Always another problem on the Internet…
Not a fan of the changes. @replies were my main source of discovering new Twitter users and led to a lot of new people to follow.
My Twitter bubble is shrinking due to this and I don’t like it. Hoping for a backlash revert.
Probably Twitter going facebook way by creating a big Buzz in the social media and then it will revert back to normal.
Whatever I hate the way twitter wrote about it on their blog, for any twitter layman it will be hard to understand what they meant there.
Hi Harsh,
You are absolutely right about twitter.This will be Buzz and will revert.Twitter want to catch an eye of Social media lovers so sting out this Buzz.
Twitter has just officially lost about 50% of its value to me. Believe it or not, I wanted to hear my friends conversations — that’s why I followed them in the first place!
I wonder if we can subvert the whole system by just randomly appending a string before our replies. ex: “RP @someuser”. It’s silly, but it should do the trick.
Sorry. Twitter’s “conversation” system is terribly flawed at its most basic level. Unless you live and breath Twitter 24/7 (which MOST users don’t & won’t do), there has to be a more direct, standardized way of showing a particular discussion progressing.
FriendFeed has the right idea – each post has an option for comments right under it. It’s not perfect, but I really don’t understand how the heck anyone’s been talking to anyone on Twitter up to this point. What a data flow nightmare!
This is just another example of poor writing and user interface design resulting in loss of function that MANY people use. There is no excuse for such a stupid response to struggles that people are having using a feature. None.
Fix it, @ev and crew and fix it NOW. Stop thinking you know better than your users. One monopolistic company thinking that way is more than enough.
Twitter has officially KILLED the discovery aspect that has made it great up to this point. I will no longer be exposed to interesting new people by seeing conversations that other people (that I already trust and follow) are having with them.
Bring ALL @replies back!
This is beyond moronic. And the hoopla just makes the folks at Twitter seem like customer service morons — which won’t help them when they want to start charging for services. And you know they will.
$20 they change it again after public backlash!
I absolutely HATE this new change. I usually find people because i get just one part of the conversation. This is also how I amassed the number of followers I have. Boo on you Twitter, Boo on You!
These days there is no news about Startups, why?
Too busy posting about Twitter, Myspace and Facebook.
Twitter has killed features in the past (like Jabber integration) and people still used it. They might not bring this feature back because they know people will still use Twitter.
What the world could use is something like Twitter, but open-source and decentralized. So server x could send messages to server y, and there could be 5 people with the same username, each on a different domain. Not necessarily a Twitter replacement — Twitter could integrate with it, but we wouldn’t be limited to just twitter.com. They are going to run out of good user names soon anyway.
Actually, is it really that big a deal considering most twitter users are using a 3rd party client anyway? Especially the early adopter crowd.
The change also affects third party clients. They simply fetch the timeline that Twitter sends, which includes or excludes stranger replies based on the @replies setting.
On the other hand, third party clients could emulate the feature by fetching the individual timelines of everyone you follow. This would eat up a sh*tload of API quota.
they’ve just killed one of my most favourite features.
Horrible move by Twitter.
I wonder who advises Twitter board to do all these things. Why is such a terribly-bad move being taken? Sure, there is going to be a lot of backlash on this move. I see petitions being submitted/mentioned above already. Hope Twitter takes cues from this and do what people want instead of do what the majority dislikes. Maybe, they should do some poll to count users’ views.
I always thought getting @replies from people who weren’t on your friends list was a great way of meeting new people.
I’m sure to be simply reiterating everything written already, but I need to get out my frustration – if you have to manually turn on the open @reply, then why would they remove it as an option.
How the celebrities are to be blamed, I can’t figure it out, but I will, I want to blame them. Mainstream users too; they are mayonnaise, they do dumb shit down and make make it bland.
FriendFeed is the future.
Twitter “buzz” is due solely to the mainstream and celebrity morons you just insulted. Without the legions of idiots who followed Oprah, Ashton & CNN when asked out of the blue, this service would be on life support by now.
Twitter as a service needs to get more user-friendly – there’s no way around it. This is just one of its many, many issues that needs to be worked on. I’m not sure Twitter will ever prove to be very useful in a world full of email, IM, RSS feeds & blogs.
I do agree that of the two though, FriendFeed is a better option.
..the powers that be at Twitter are as moronic as their pithy byline, ‘What are you doing?’ If they really wanted to gain traction with the masses, they would do well to put up a getting started tutorial. That, and getting rid of the ‘what are you doing’ tagline as if confuses the hell out of most people as to its value proposition..
Twitter makes the argument for using FriendFeed instead easier each day.
It’s like the Old Days, back before the unwashed masses appeared, when Twitter would throw features overboard to keep from sinking, and all the early Twitterers clung on for dear life while scouting the horizon for a friendly vessel. Except for now, they are throwing the early Twitterer’s overboard to make room for their new kool friends like Oprah, and Ashton, and CNN.
Ok, I’m sorry, its not Oprah, or Ashton, it’s the dumbshits that have come to kiss their boots (says the guy who tweeted @rainnwilson just before reading Techcrunch).
This @replies change simply doesn’t make sense at all
This merely serves as proof that Twitter cares more about the new sheeple…er, I mean users…than they’d care to admit – likely because of an intent to monetize the site at some point fairly soon.
It also speaks volumes about the future of Twitter and their plan to dumb it down for the lowest common denominator of web user in order to maximize the potential to take advantage of a larger user base once the site has been monetized.
If you’re not smart enough to figure out how to configure which @replies appear in your Twitterstream using the previously available option in the settings area, you’re too stupid to use Twitter to begin with.
“If you’re not smart enough to figure out how to configure which @replies appear in your Twitterstream using the previously available option in the settings area, you’re too stupid to use Twitter to begin with.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself!!
I wonder why they have to put forward changes all the time.. when they know they will have many people from amongst old and new complaining about one thing or another
I find it funny that they’re citing the trend of users using it set to the default as evidence it’s the best choice. That ignores the fact that, some users were confused by what it means so never changed it, some users never changed it simply because they never even ventured around to know those settings existed, some never changed it because they didn’t care enough to change it. It’s a silly assumption that most people used the default because they thought it the best solution.
Even as they’ve gotten rid of it, people are still unaware of what the setting was and what it means now. As evidenced here:
“If someone who is not following you “@” replies to you, it will not show up in your notification stream. #fixreplies”
I didn’t notice this.. I will check it out..
I totally agree with this post. I was using this feature all the time, and I doubt that anyone got confused by it, since it was _not_ the default.
This is really really annoying!
Hello,
Do you not have jobs? Why don’t you all go outside and get some fresh air like in the old days?
Peace out xxx
I noticed my timeline updates went down a bit today, lost many diverting, interesting conversation, why would twitter do that? What would @biz do that? Are there any chess players within twitter’s organization? Where is the strategic planning? I want to see their “data”. Turn it back on!
Wayback machine: "Track" mentioned in Twitter Blog: Tracking Twitter 09/24/2007 http://blog.twi...ng-twitter.html
I find it quietly comforting that there are features of tweeting that remind me of the “secret” menu found at In n Out Burger. You’re only “cool” if you’re in-the-know…or if you created it. I think it’s amusingly funny and should be taken with a grain of salt. =)
So many hats I love in your posts – Keep up the good work Mike!
MA
P.S. I’m new to this site and language so my english may not come through correctly all the time. sorry.