Remember Twitter, that super simple service for sending messages? Well, last night they instituted a change that should have made it more streamlined, but users revolted because it’s never a good idea to take away features. So today, Twitter relented and gave users the feature back. Only they did so in a way that is hilariously convoluted.
Previously, if you wanted to see another user’s @replies even if they were talking to someone you weren’t following, you had to select that option in the settings. Some people had, and enjoyed it. But the default setting for that was off, so Twitter simply removed the option to turn it on. But some users loved it so Twitter is now turning it back on — kind of. Apparently, soon you will be able to see these @replies again but only when a person is using them when not clicking the “reply” button.
So basically, you can see when someone is replying to someone else but only when they’re not really replying to them. Yeah, this is going to confuse the hell out of people. Remember “Keep It Simple, Stupid“? Yeah, this is the opposite.
I consider myself a pretty savvy Twitter user and I had to read it twice to understand just what the hell Twitter meant. I also just had a hilarious conversation with fellow writer Jason Kincaid, where we debated just what exactly Twitter meant. The fact that we had to have that conversation is not a good sign.
Twitter also claims to have second fix in mind, that will involve giving users more control over what exactly they see from which users. This is getting really complicated, quick. It sounds like the convoluted settings mess Facebook has become.
This whole situation has turned into an absolute disaster. Twitter claimed it was just removing a feature that relatively few people used, but if it really believed that, it should have stuck with it. Instead, it admitted that the move was done to help with scaling issues.
“We learned a lot,” is the title of Twitter’s post. That’s really code for, “a lot of people bitched, and so we’re half going back to the old way.” Don’t go half. Either do it or don’t do it. You may have been taught a lesson by your users, but you’re not heeding the lessons of other services in the past that have over-complicated things.
moving over to pownce
Pownce is dead as many other Twitter-like micro blogging sites. There’s a few hanging around but not many were able to garner enough traffic.
POWNCE IS DEAD? NO WAI!!!
It is difficult to analyze how the whole system works. Adding or removing a feature can imply a lot.
“Remember Twitter, that super simple service for sending messages?”
Yes, I remember that shitty useless thing everytime I read an article on TC..How dare you even ask this question..
“Remember Twitter, that super simple service for sending messages?”
Yes, unfortunately every other article is about tweeter. This blog should just become tweets. Forget real sentences.
Agreed!
Don’t read the blog then
The cycle is on track:
1. What is X?
2. X is so cooool!
3. People who created X are geniuses!
4. People who created X are idiots!
5. X sucks!
6. What is X?
The key is to sell at stage 3.
Originally posted by Mr Google Alerts: http://www.aler...mrgooglealerts/
Um…. @replies are ANYTHING but simple
Case in point:
“@techcrunch is that really your opinion on the matter?”
“@techcrunch is really rocking this Bon Jovi karaoke track!”
There’s no reliable way to make such a system 100% reproducible in intent while adding language analysis to let a backend system “automagically” determine if its a public mention, or a reply, without actually CLICKING on a reply icon.
It’s not hard here:
If you type “@whoever”, it’s a mention and everyone gets to see it.
If you explicitly click reply, you are replying specifically to that tweet, hence it is a reply.
Done.
i dont get it
AMATEUR HOUR AT TWITTER
Basically, before you could see when people were talking to someone you weren’t following yet and now you can’t.
Please sign my #fixreplies #twitterfail petition here so we can send a crystal clear message about where their core users stand:
http://bit.ly/fixtwitter
It’s completely ridiculous that they’re even playing this game. One of the most useful pieces of Twitter has been the one-sided conversation. I invariably follow-through and find myself discovering new, interesting people to follow. People I would’ve never been exposed to before.
Engineering problems or not, solve them. Saying your users “don’t use” the service is pretty fucking ridiculous, since there’s a clear outcry here. Taking away features has been a specialty of Twitter, but it’s really frustrating when they start taking away entire pieces of the site that set it apart.
Yes, they call that the “vocal minority.”
Problem is, for Twitter, their vocal minority overlaps pretty well with their influencers.
My take on #twitterfail is that the majority of people there thought that @replies as a whole were being removed, didn’t actually know what was being changed, and joined the outrage because of those influencers.
The Twitter lesson has less to do with Facebook Change Protest and more to do with Top Digger Revolt.
Good to know, thanks for the Twitter network status update.
You still don’t see twitter replies, you see only see what look like replies but are not.
I just want to know what the thinking is behind doing these “maintenance” sessions right in the middle of their busiest times. Whatever happened to 3 am upgrades?
They don’t happen any more. Part of the galactic order maintenance practice codes now.
3am was very timezonecentric of you. Perhaps you’d like to ask how the rest of the longitude differing globe feels about that?
Cut this crap OUT! Make a new site called TweetCrunch.com or something but I swear if there is one more effing twitter article over the stupidest, tiniest update on Twitter I am unsubscribing.
Get off twitter’s nuts and write about something productive.
Aren’t you on twitter? Please join. I want to follow you.
ha. tweetcrunch already exists.
Been there. Done that. Got the domain.
http://crunchtweet.com
I was just going to suggest TechCrunchIT which at least seemed to have a more serious slant but they just went and burst that bubble.
I like TC, I really do, but maybe more of TC’s writers need to pull a Sarah Lacy and get out of the valley for a while. Hitting some local startup events, I’ve seen enough cool things going on in tech to fill TechCrunch for a month, and zero of them have a thing to do with Twitter.
I’m guessing because of some soon-to-be announced merger.
I’ll keep asking til I get an answer.
So what does this mean to Seesmic/Tweetdeck et al.
i think TechCrunch should write another post about commenters who get mad when TechCrunch writes about Twitter just to get them mad again so I can tweet about it. heh.
++
Why is MG Sielger’s name still on Venturebeat’s Masthead?
Is TC buying VB?
Do tell…
Here’s the passage I was confused about from the Twitter blog:
“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.”
It’s really ambiguous. “That account” could either refer to the account sending the tweet, or the person that the tweet is being directed towards. The latter example wouldn’t make much sense, but neither does this convoluted ‘reply’ button stuff.
From a dev point of view. When you click on the reply button it added to your tweet the id of what it’s in reply to. So this is what that means. If your not following the person who the tweet is in reply to (by clicking the button in conversation) it won’t show up on your timeline.
So – this is the bit I don’t get: I am assuming a tweet is ONLY the text in it. How does the system distinguish between the “@friend” being in the tweet because you typed it there, and it being in the tweet by virtue of you having clicked on the Reply button? If it can – isn’t this an API change? (forgive me – I haven’t used the API – I just read the docs, didn’t see such a parameter.) If it can’t – then the caveat “beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon)” is incorrect?
There’s some magic going on somewhere since when you since when you pull a tweet of there is a field (can’t remember off the top of my head) like inResponseTo…hence sometimes you can follow a conversation in some clients (Tweetie and Tweetree for example). Also in the search it has the images of both people sometimes…sometimes it doesn’t. This is due to this inResponseTo (methinks)
You’re assuming wrong. A tweet is not only the text in it. There’s an in-reply-to field that’s filled in by the reply button, but not by the mere presence of an @username at the start of the tweet. Which is why Twitter’s proposed fix is so dumb.
And will this once again be an option that is off by default, that you have to turn on (I assume so).
Also, I know sometimes I reply to someone just to get their name typed in quick, when really i’m not replying to anything they actually said.
Also, I assume this will work for third-party services as well, but who knows.
Also, I don’t get it.
I had a quick Twitter discussion with someone earlier about this as well. I told him I had to read it several times in order to understand what they were saying. And in the part where they talk about users getting more control of what they see, they say it’s a “per-user” setting. What does that mean?! Are they implying that you have to go to each user and customize what you see from him/her? Or are they referring to the user performing the settings?
You know what this is? Pride. They tried something new, no one liked it, and like you said, they’re half going back. They don’t want to admit they were wrong and just say, “Damn, we fucked up. We’ll revert back to the way it was.”
If I’m wrong and it really is a scalability/engineering issue… wow. Twitter haz problems.
Im still confused. Why not just say “Hey we screwed the pooch, how should we fix it?” from the get-go, rather than 1) Bullshit us 2) Blame the engineers 3) Back down with a half ass hack?
I think 1 & 3 has happened.
Heh, pretty funny. So am I getting this right: if you manually type the “@[username]” it’s broadcast…if you click the reply link, it’s not?
As I said before, scalability is HARD. I can understand their position – but yeah, needs a better solution.
I believe that’s exactly right Dean. At least that’s my interpretation
Their search facility seems to be pretty awesome from what I can fathom. There are so many api calls going on too – damn right it’s hard.
Maybe they should make tweets 140 chars or more so that there isn’t so many tweets posted lol
Wa ha ha, that picture is bloody awesome! It almost makes up for Twitter’s sheer daftness.
We’ve got it on reserve for face-palm moments like these.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise is not pleased with Twitter.
What an awful idea. Twitter should work instead on improving the Web client. After 100 or so followings, it’s not practical to use it so everyone uses TweeDeck (or other software).
Dear MG,
Thank you for the Picard Face Palm. Can we get it in ASCII next time?
Thanks, I wonder if when you work this out if you could you could give us an English translation. Being in the southern hemisphere we have enough trouble as it is trying to make sense of things. I have about 30 web development students and some will struggle with this. In fact, as I’m eating my breakfast at the moment and about to go off and talk about changes happening on the web, my head is hurting.
Thanks Tony
Now already confused would be even more confused
I’m the first to admit that there’s too much trivial Twitter nonsense on TC, but this is pretty funny.
Timeline of events:
1) @replies in stream removed. Few people knew how to enable them. They were called complicated and confusing by the powers that be.
2) Angry nerds melt their @ keys in protest.
3) Twitter relents, enabling formerly-rare, “confusing” people for everybody, sometimes.
Wow, you confused the hell out of me from reading what you are trying to say there… let alone trying it figure out what Twitter is doing with the @replies..
I LOVE TWITTER STORIES!!
Jason Calacornus
http://www.twittercrunch.com
Me too. Seriously. I love how people get riled over it.
definitely a “Doh!” moment from Twitter. Even Homer Simpson will be embarrassed!
ANOTHER twitter story? are you kidding me? What a joke…
What an original name for an original comment!
The best way to fix this would be to keep the feature but add another feature that blocks that feature.
If it really was a relatively small user base, and they were anticipating problems as it scaled, then it seems like it would have been a better idea to let those who are already using the feature keep it, turn off the option for new users or users that have never turned it on. Throw some hardware to support the existing userbase, and in the meantime figure out the long-term solution. But to take away the feature and then give it back in a more confusing way seems like a recipe for outrage.
I actually like what Twitter has done. Alas, the confusion is between composing an @name “reply” and truly actually replying. To me, composing a new message that starts with @name is not a reply, it is a tweet targeted to an individual. A reply is a tweet truly in reply to a received Tweet. The Twitter system (and client apps) can tell the difference. Now, to me: as to whether the actual reply is meant for everyone to see, that should be up to the tweeter who is replying, not the recipient nor the public.
As for the new way they are doing @replies…
there is a special part of the API called “in_reply_to_status_id”, by clicking on the reply button, you are setting the reply to this ID, this way you can see “In reply to @so-and-so” and click on it. The way they are saying they will be changing it is by filtering out all messages with “in_reply_to_status_id” instead of just @replies.
This is good, and this is bad. This is bad because many conversations on Twitter are done this way, and it’s a pain to have to manually check everyone’s profile page in order to grab that information and that some people use Twitter as a chatroom. A GIANT FUCKING CHATROOM. I believe that if we didn’t want everyone else seeing our posts, then we should simply use Direct Messages. Isn’t that what they are there for? And a Public Reply is supposed to be public!
I also don’t believe the scalability bullshit. Now when giving out feeds, they have to use filters to filter out messages with “@replies” and “in_reply_to_status_id”’s, instead of just leaving it unfiltered. Ridiculous, and ass backwards.
Also, imagine what a new user would think when he comes in. He follows a few people, waits a couple of days and then clicks on one of the profiles just to check something out. All of a sudden he realizes that he missed all of those fucking tweets! He wonders what the hell is going on and why he’s not getting them. THAT’S FUCKING ASANINE DAMMIT!
Twitter didn’t really dumb it down, it actually made it more complex.
Oh, and I didn’t have a good part. BECAUSE NOTHING GOOD CAN FUCKING COME FROM THIS!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use identi.ca…
because they actually have things that Twitter users have been asking for for a long time.
You’re the kind of guy for which they used to recommend flowcharts. Try to follow this:
Old system: Every time you @reply, Twitter has to do a database lookup on every one of your followers to see if they’ve set their account to show all @replies. (In other words, the database load is the same whether or not they want to see them.)
New system: Every time you post an @reply, Twitter checks for an “in_reply_to_status_id,” and if it doesn’t exist, then checks all of your users for the ‘all replies’ flag.
It’s the “check all your followers” that’s the processor drain, especially for accounts with thousands of followers. The load for a “in_reply_to_status_id” test is a small load that (in most cases) prevents the larger-load action. It’s a justfiable expense.
Just to take a few steps back.
If they made the system as simple as possible (like it was right at the start) then everyone received EVERYTHING that was tweeted by anyone that they were following.
So if someone I’m following posts something then I get it appearing in my stream and so does everyone else following that person. No need to o any database look up yet.
If Twitter had the setting set for everyone to “display all @replies even if I’m not following the person they are directed to” then @replies would just be like ordinary messages and there wouldn’t have to be any special behaviour (no database lookup).
I think what people seem to be saying is that it is simpler to understand Twitter (and people prefer it if) the default is for everyone to receive all @replies. They should remove the option and put everyone onto this.
This is simpler and allows for discovery.
“I think what people seem to be saying is that it is simpler to understand Twitter (and people prefer it if) the default is for everyone to receive all @replies. They should remove the option and put everyone onto this.”
Some people prefer it. Some of us have @replies to people we’re not ourselves following turned off by design.
I’m not all that happy that all tweets prefixed by @[username] (entered by typing, not replying) are now going to slip through with this “fix.”
The problem unfortunately is not that the option of allowing all replies was more costly than having to do the filtering, but rather that the option was there in the first place. (There were three settings you could have: 1) no replies 2) replies for the people you follow 3) all replies).
With that option existing, they needed to check which option you had selected and then make a decision accordingly. When one of their geniuses decided this was a big drain on the system, what they decided to do was to remove the option, and instead ‘fix’ it at the least-confusing choice, which is #2.
Of course, I think it sucks, because for the most part, I liked option #3 – even though you’d have to suffer through your occasional long one sided conversations from people who don’t know how to DM, or conversations with people whose profiles are private.
“it is simpler to understand Twitter (and people prefer it if) the default is for everyone to receive all @replies. They should remove the option and put everyone onto this.”
It doesn’t matter that if that’s “simpler: — 97$ of users have already decided they don’t want that.
97% is a bigger number than 3%. If Twitter has to choose between 2 interfaces, picking the one that benefits the 97% is a no-brainer.
See, the Internet is computers and people. Sometimes, you actually have to take the people into account.
I don’t care how much extra database lookup or complexity it introduces. That’s like saying we should stick to command-line interfaces because it means we can do less processing.
The simple fact is that Twitter isn’t nearly as useful without being able to see all of the tweets people you follow make.
That is why you follow them…
It’s pretty obvious Twitter engineers are worried with how to keep scaling up, so instead of throwing more hardware at the problem, they’re removing “CPU expensive” code altogether to deal with the increase in usage. Not a great move, but then they’re making no money so increases in expenditure may not be justified (see how meaningless multi-millon dollar valuations are?).
This is beginning to make me dizzy. Why can’t they just go back to the way things were? Is their network really teetering on the brink of crashing because some of us wanted to see all @replies?
I’m really not sure what to believe any more.
I’m confused since their original message about the “slight change” that would make folks less confused specified that regular references to accounts in tweets would not be impacted. I assumed they meant like follow friday references. So, doesn’t that mean that all along you could have simply used a reply format without clicking the reply button?
Fuck Twitter! There has got to be more to life than babbling over how to deliver or read or voyeur a 140 character message. I believe Twitter is an insidious disease. Once we have all got it it will be used to hypnotize all of us into zombie-like slaves, captives within our own minds. Clearly TC has already received a terminal dose.
It’s not that I hate Twitter, it is that I am embarrassed for humanity that this is what we read and talk about all day long. There is nothing really cool going on in the world of IT and technology? Twitter is as hot as it gets?
Just spin-off a new company/blog, call it twittercrunch. And shoot all this stuff there for a while. Focus more on developing things of more than 140 characters.
People had the option whether or not to see all tweets that were @directed to somebody else. If I didn’t want to see if I didn’t have to, if I wanted to, i could. Now we’ll all be able to see the start of the conversation but if we’re not following both people we can’t see the actual conversation transpire? That’s like showing me the beginning of a movie then turning it off.
In the end, this fix doesn’t really appease those who were complaining (and knew what they were complaining about. a large number of people thought it meant they’d no longer get replies from ppl they didn’t follow) and also sounds like it adds noise to the stream of people who had that default option set specifically because they wanted it (and not because they didn’t know they could change it).
I liked being able to traverse a conversation in the middle of it following the “in reply to” links if it seemed interesting. I also liked being able to find friends that i didn’t know were on twitter because other friends @replied them (the “fix” solves this aspect)
TechCrunch FAIL. Instead of stopping to question the fishy news Twitter passed along, Jason and crew just shoveled out what got shoveled in to them via Twitter’s corporate messaging.
Like we need TechCrunch editors to dress up the lying PR pitches of other companies…
“This blog should just become tweets. Forget real sentences.”
So true.
Get off the Twitter bandwagon or people will stop visiting this site. The Twitter bone-up is getting old like a pair of stanky boxers
Actually I think the only reason I even still come to techSmash is to giggle at the comments people write
Scaling issues? Twitter? Naaaaah!
Now’s the time to start looking seriously at a federated micro-blogging infrastructure like the folks at Laconica proposed. Twitter-compatible API, but you can spread your users across hundreds of services, etc. Much better way to handle this sort of thing than rely on a central organization to handle it all.
We learned that lesson with email, and now it looks like we’re going to learn it all over again with “micro-blogging”.
and the requisite link that was missing from my previous post:
Laconica: http://laconi.ca/trac/
This is all just retarded. Who cares. Two or three years from now no one will use twitter, the founders will be rich, and seriously, WTF. Too much time to wank. Just shut up already.
I hate Twitter. Why does anyone care what I’m doing at all times? Why would you think anyone cares what you’re doing at all times?
do you sit on the floor of your apartment alone every night with your hands around your knees rocking back and forth?
TechCrunch does when twitter twitches.
Who knows? They don’t sound like a twitter user so probably not.
God Twitter is stupid.
I’ve just decided I’m going to look for a more interesting feed to replace the space TechCrunch has on my home page. There is just a little news between the Twitter features, and the writers appear to be laughing about it. Keep twitter off main blog for a week and I’ll stay.
Honestly, these shitty non-replies are getting pretty infuriating.
First they “clarify” the feature removal by telling me something I already knew. Then they make up a shitty excuse based on a technical problem that never existed before. Now they do something that has next to zero impact on the problem, and promise they /may/ do something that may or may not be related to the removed feature.
Really, Twitter. Jesus f*ck.
Too bad there’s no ‘alternative’ to Twitter’s stream of sh*t.
Or maybe someone will have to code a freaking Twitter client that gets the full stream from certain users via a brute force API call for each user. Not exactly the best user experience and bound to reach the API call limit pretty easily, eh Twitter?
F*ck.
In this case, “we learned a lot” is really code for “we didn’t learn a damn thing.”
Remind me again why twitter isn’t a total joke and waste of everyone’s time?
Your not on it!
Yeah. How will I cope without daft comments from semi-literate twatters?
If you can see: you don’t see!
A lot of people complained when facebook changed their layout. Now people like it, and it’s increased the number of visits.
Listening to the users is not always the best alternative, although this time I have to agree they messed up.