Surprise, surprise. Last night Twitter abruptly decided to disable an option in the way @replies worked. The feature, while not widely used, was very popular among so-called ‘power users’ because it helped expose them to new users and conversations. Users have been up in arms since the change, venting their complaints in the highly trending channel #fixreplies. It’s been a disaster.
At the time of the change co-founder Biz Stone wrote an oddly condescending blog post, stating that the feature was an “undesirable and confusing option” which was exactly why they took it away. This didn’t make much sense given the fact that the option was nestled in the settings menu and wasn’t the default. Most people didn’t even know it was there.
This morning in a new blog post titled Whoa Feedback, Stone has revealed the true reason behind the change: it’s an engineering problem. Stone writes “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.”
This is a PR failure on Twitter’s part. The company was totally misleading about their motivation for killing the option, and now they’re forced to fess up because they’d have a tough time re-enabling it. Granted, most people don’t use the feature, and it is confusing. But those are merely supporting arguments – the company could have easily tucked the feature away in a set of advanced options for power users.
Naturally, it was too obvious.
Sorry for the spam, but please try out http://www.wallpipe.com (launched today).
It is a mix of facebook + twitter + digg. Hope you all will like it.
Once again, sorry for spam.
you’re not sorry.
But his site is.
Delete this. The lamers hoping for any publicity via TC comments get really boring. Blatant spam like this should put them on a blacklist meaning they never get covered on TC in the future.
I hope twitter reverts her decision because the @ reply is a way of discovering new users to follow.
Try some cloud solutions, let say, GAE? :p
i love twitter, but they are still acting like a company working out of a garage. They have a LOT of funding, so why don’t they:
1) hire a great team of engineers to fix their problems
2) hire a company to manage their obviously overloaded support help system (our support ticket has languished in their “assignment” box going on 9 WEEKS now)
3) hire a good PR firm to act as official spokesperson
It’s cute and all when a company is young and unfunded; they can be forgiven an awful lot. But when you hit Oprah + celebs + CNN + NYT in 1 month of PR (a lifetime of PR for most start-ups), you’ve made the big time. Now act like it.
I would have been way more sympathetic had they been truthful about the change. I love Twitter but now I have lost a lot of my respect for their founders.
it seems apparent that he has no idea why they changed it. either that or he doesn’t want to reveal the real reason.
Quote from the Twitter blog post: “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.”
Ummm, kinda like the rest of Twitter? Obviously it (Twitter) needs a major rewrite, not just the @replies portion.
Accurate, but since twitter is just a toy, only dorks even care.
More interesting aspect of the post is Kincaids obvious lack of technical acumen. His statement that they could have just left the feature for some users only shows that he really has no idea of how the technology works. And to call bad PR on twitter is rediculous, they have oprah comming out of their ass for gods sake.
Or it is going to be part of the paid sevice they say they are not going to offer.
BINGO!
i can’t wait until becomes old news and some other “hot” tech company takes over
*twitter
Breaking news: TechCrunch writes a coldly condescending post about Twitter under the guise of “reporting” and “journalism” but upon a closer examination the post was simply link-bait, written solely to boost pageviews and traffic to their fast-declining blog.
TechCrunch, how dare you lie! Fess up!
And again, we don’t care…
The Twitter backlash has begun!! This is the first negative article in a while about Twitter on TC. Soon all the articles will probably be negative(like they are about Facebook. Poor Facebook, always hated on by TC.)
It all will be forgotten it a few days…
And to this, I say big deal. So what.
I would hardly call this a negative when only 1 or 2% of users even understand the issue. Besides, if there are architectural issues surrounding the issue, why would you hinder Twitter trying to make progress.
Or would you rather play with a whale?
You don’t pay for the service, yet, so you have no ground to stand and bitch upon. Get over it.
I don’t pay for the swine flu, either. I don’t pay for laws in California. I don’t pay for unclean air. I don’t pay for murder.
Based on your logic, we should just let those things be.
News flash: Thousands of years of society say you’re wrong, people DO have a RESPONSIBILITY to stand up and say when something is amiss.
“I don’t pay for laws in California. I don’t pay for unclean air. I don’t pay for murder.”
If you pay taxes in the US, you *do* pay for those things.
I have been using the @ feechur, and liked it. But I won’t miss any sleep now that it is gone. I’m going to try the wallpipe mentioned in this thread, I believe… see what it is.
May I respectfully disagree with you Wayne?
Twitter does not charge money for its services; however, the exchange has been defined by them and includes transparency.
I see two breaches of transparency:
1- the @replies disablement.
2- the lies attached to the reasons given.
These are major failures to deliver.
make no mistake about it… WE are the reason that twitter got so popular. People who use it, power users, and those that tell their friends about it. It is social media, after all. And we may only be “2%” (although I would suspect those numbers are fudged after reading about their “engineering concerns”…truth was, they needed to change for scalability) but we are VOCAL. I could use many other social media platforms, but I chose twitter. Why? Because I enjoyed the cross conversation!!
And about not paying for the service? See above comment. Twitter BUILT themselves upon our backs. We added the @replies option in the first place! We have every right to bitch about how things are done. Instead, maybe they should tell Ashton Kutcher (aplusk) that he cannot have a MILLION followers, that will surely kill their servers. But no, twitter is too busy raking in VC money to even worry about the little people, it is their M.O. Why change now?
wayne shut thee hell up. it doesnt matter if we dont pay..we pay with time! if we are all using it, OBVIOUSLY theyre getting SOMETHING out of it! nothing is completely free! we pay them with our time and they pay us by providing a good service. too bad we are getting the raw end of the deal right now.
since its so free, lets see how they feel when everyone leaves and starts using something else? im sure the loss of users will come out of their pockets in SOME FORM! so dont give us that BS. theyre not doing us this big favor by making twitter! obviously theres something in it for them.
Twitter’s ENTIRE appeal is based on transparency – access to the thoughts of everyone in the Twitterverse who has not protected their updates. This development is not an architectural fail, it’s the beginning of a business strategy for paid usage and the beginning of the end for Twitter.
I care.
With that lie Twitter lost my trust today. And together with that loss of functionality they lost me too.
I don’t believe they are truly listening – how many hundred thousand tweets were made before we saw a 2nd blog post?
who doesn’t use this feature. i’ve yet to “meet” one person who doesn’t just let the stream be what it’s going to be.
That’s the first time I’m really not satisfied with Twitter. It’s an awesome application and idea, but this is just PLAIN stupid. What ‘technical reasons’? If you got a problem say something like this: “Till we have enough money and man power we’ll have to disable special replies. Sorry for that, we’ll fix that soon.”
But there is a way to temporarily circumvent that:
RTs work, right? You can also see RTs from people you don’t follow, right? So: Just add some letters in front of the @.
Instead of ‘@yetused: You are the hottest!’ you can write ‘To @yetused: You are the hottest!’ or ‘At @yetused:…’. Then everyone that follows you will receive all your replies!
What twitter app will be the first to offer an option to include a character or phrase before @ on replies? They already have retweet buttons that twitter has missed including yet.
Very good idea! If this new reply ban is here to stay twitter apps really should consider adding a ‘*’ maybe or some kind of ‘|’ or maybe ‘>’ in front of the replies. Automation for the win.
I have long been mentioning that Twitter needs a responsible PR person
RT @Alonis: RT @jack: Twitter will not democratize media as much as it will inspire a more direct, genuine, & immediate discourse between every entity.
RT@Alonis: @Jack Yeah, every entity except @Twitter. You guys need to create a responsive Twitter spokesperson.
(What? I wasn’t going to re-write what I already posted. Made sense to re-tweet it)
lol
You’d have to be an idiot to think it wasn’t a technical-based decision for the geometric growth of infrastructure to support networked updates.
I mean, are we supposed to believe that this “flaw” in Twitters’ user experience was holding back all sorts of usage growth potential?
I guess I am one of those so-called “power users”, but I follow 1800+ of the 2800+ who follow me. I LIKE to get to know new people based upon their tweets. I learn a lot, and that was the entire point of twitter for me.
I wrote my take on it, said it was a scalability issue before @biz fessed up. twitter is #fail on this one.
T.
I also think this earns a TechCrunch FAIL mark as well. There was no thought to question what came out of Twitter on this one. And TechCrunch took the bait and never questioned it. How much tech does TechCrunch really know?
Look at the facts:
* Twitter is often down due to scaling failures.
* The networked updates of friends create a geometric growth in updates in your feed, resulting in a geometric growth in infrastructure demand.
* Twitter has no reason to worry about poor user experience these days, given as simple as the product is and given their monthly growth numbers attest.
Basically, some folks at Twitter saw the geometric growth that these updates caused and wanted to head off the tidal wave before it wiped them out. Then someone at Twitter put a spit polish lie on as to why.
TechCrunch failed in its mission to think technically about the reported rationale.
Me too. I use @replies to get a little more insight into people and decide who I want to follow (or not). Now, will I even know if they bother to reply to people, or if they just ignore them?
What I hate most is being underestimated and then lied to about it. How disappointing. I was really enjoying twitter, the closest to fun open chatting I’ve found in years.
I was wondering how things would change when a Ashton and Oprah brought celebrity awareness to twitter and a whole bunch of non-tech celeb followers jumped on. Now we know, and I’m afraid this may just be the beginning.
“Granted, most people don’t use the feature, and it is confusing”
How do you know this statement is true? I’m not a power user, but I used it often. As a fairly new Twitterer, it was absolutely the easiest way for me to find others.
This smells like a lie too!
One reason I can think of for twitter to take the risk of exposing itself to this sort of PR backslash is in prep of a sale of the Cy, where the acquirer needs @replies disabled and done prior to monetization, and wants the bad press and blame on the present team, with none of the risk.
Say Murdoch (for instance) buys twitter & does the changes; the backslash would be much bigger & risk killing twitter… So Murdoch requires that the changes be made, the backslash cushioned and things back to normal prior to an acquisition.
Of course, this is pure conjecture, but the smell of rotten rats is unmistakable.
In addition, contrary to some comments above, I do not think that anyone at twitter is that stupid.
at this stage in the growth of the company, everything is measured and weighted before it is done – they have the capital to purchase the best lawyer, strategist & VC advice – the chances of this being a PR blunder are close to zero!
So, it must be something else…
35 million in funding couldnt have bought them some engineers who could have solve this problem.
Yeah, they definately need a PR person indeed.
Last night the feature is removed because their metrics and ‘feedback’ say it is underutilized and leads to a confused user experience.
Now we read that scaleability is the real deal.
Tomorrow I suspect we’ll be reading how they jumped the shark.
It was bad enough that they killed a feature and blamed it on the feature being too confusing (rather than explaining it better).
But to then come out and admit that you basically can’t keep your site running despite millions in VC funding & THATS why you had to kill off the feature, is just pathetic.
They’ve made their incompetence an even bigger story than it would have been originally.
#fixreplies #TwitterFail #TwitterLied
Firstly, care to explain what that feature actually does? Secondly, why is it lying? It seems “technical reasons” is not much different than “it’s confusing”. It could understand the outrage if they were trying to hinder a competitor or something like that, but it seems you’re just blowing it out of proportion for your own benefit.
Bad reporting on both counts.
Telling people it’s a user experience issue one day, then admitting it’s a scalability issue the 2nd is what makes it a lie.
As for the utility of the feature – it allows individuals whom don’t always want to follow each other on a daily basis to have periodic dialogs.
It also helps people find other people of common interest based on the content and context of what someone else is saying &/or doing.
Wow, this is simple public relations 101 stuff. This is exactly where a trained public relations professional finds his or her worth. A PRs job is not to pitch meaningless stories but to help CEOs and management navigate away from bad mistakes like this one.
I hadn’t realized that seeing all replies was an advanced setting rather than the default. My account was set up that way for as long as I can remember. I suppose I might have checked a certain box, but it probably just seemed like the most logical choice when I set up my account.
And like so many others I’ve come to rely on it to find new accounts to follow. My stream seems far less conversational now that it’s gone. I hope they come up with a solution.
OMG now Twitter is down. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!
True, I read the notice that they were going to be down at noon Pacific, which it is right now, but TechCrunch needs to frontpage a story nonetheless. I want my money back! How am I supposed to procrastinate???
TWITTERFAIL!!!!1
>> it’s an engineering problem
From the looks of it, it probably was an “engineering problem”, which was probably slowing down the entire system.
Twitter definitely has to do something about it or people will start leaving. I agree with Heidi, my stream has been far less conversational now that it’s gone.
Definitely bad PR, it doesn’t look like Twitter has a PR firm.
The way twitter is handling this doesn’t surprise me in the least. Smells like twitter’s getting ready to charge for some of these “premium” features.
there is a workaround – put a char before the @ sign and twitter won’t filter it:
“@RoyOsherove something” WILL be filtered.
“-@RoyOsherove something” WILL NOT be filtered.
Now let’s ask the twitter clients to add an automated option to add this so we won’t forget to do this ourselves.
I believe this explanation.
Some of these technical issues are truly difficult. Twittering a one-on-one private conversation is one thing. Broadcasting that to thousands is another.
There is no such thing as “one” of a tweet. You either pay by copying it (many writes to everyone, one read by everyone), or using a single instance (one write, many reads by everyone). Depending on architecture, reads are generally faster than writes – but on this scale, even a simple memcached read gets heady.
Even if reads/writes are uber fast, the real kicker is that they’re doing this millions of times an hour. The sheer insanity of their volume reveals (normally hidden) OS, memcached, RR, etc. memory leaks and bugs — and bam!, your seeing the “Fail Whale”.
Throwing money, people, hardware at a problem won’t solve it — all those, in conjunction with time and skill, will. So, if they get the time, and have the proper skill, they’ll be able to crack this nut and possibly bring the feature back!
What seems odd to me, is that the query to read my timeline, find all the @ replies see if the @ person is somebody I am subscribed to and publish it in certain cases and not publish it in other cases is much more complicated than just fetching and publishing everything..
Perhaps I am overlooking something, but seems like from a scalability standpoint, this new system is going to take a lot more database crunching than the old system.
I think the Twitter “Power Users” need to wake up and realize they are no longer the target audience.
Power users will grumble for another a couple of days and some will be so frustrated they will move to FF, while the majority of users won’t notice a thing.
..whether this is the real reason or not, bottomline is that Twitter needs new mgt. it’s been proven time and again that the current leadership is incapable dealing with the demands of a large scale communication platform.
that along with public appearances by the founders @biz, @ev clearly indicate that theyve drank so much of their own kool-aid, theyre oblivious to outside opinion that does not align with their own.
For all those who are groaning about ur free use of Twitter, how many of you are going to stop using it when they come back on line? Would I be right in guessing O.? Rest my case.
If they would have just said that in the first place, people would have just make a few cracks about hamsters getting tired and had it over with.
Power users aren’t necessarily devs, but most have enough of a geeky streak to get that sometimes when something gets really big, the systems that were built can’t keep up and have to be disabled.
People would have complained a bit, but I can’t imagine it would have been such an uproar. When your most vocal audience has “transparency” as a core mantra, this kind of attempt at covering up reasons is bound to fail.
These little things with twitter have grown so tiresome, but at the same time we are not going anywhere. I do however hope that twitter gets there stuff together. And if they don’t have a pr firm they need to get on it.
Latest blog entry about it from Twitter: http://blog.twi...earned-lot.html
The @ feature is such a great feature, this is pretty sad news indeed.
wow, who cares?
You realize you don’t explain, in this entire post, what this feature actually did.
Still confused…
Evan–Good point. Better than just confused, now you (and I) are METAconfused.
Doesn’t sound like they handled it very well.
Twitter is gay.
Twitter said they had to remove a feature cuz it was “confusing?” Oh, sure. True or not, that reads like a headline from “The Onion.”
The feature was the best. now I can’t see a friends tweet if they do not tweet to someone who I am not following. If I follow someone I wanna know when they wipe their ass!
@somedummy
Agreed. I realize they’re not a google-sized company, but they do own the microblogging space, with millions of active users. They’re still being treating this (and referred to) as a ’start up’. When do companies ’stop’ being ’start ups’? $10 million in funding? $50 million? $150 million? 500 employees? I still hear some people refer to facebook as a ’start up’, presumably because it’s not IPOd or been bought out yet.
I think it was pretty easy to figure out this was an engineering/scaling issue. Now that Twitter have ’succeeded’ in having hundreds of accounts with tens (hundreds?) of millions of ‘follow’ relationships going on, even a handful of big name people turning this option on could probably bring the system to its virtual knees. But to lie about it at the beginning (”it’s confusing, yet we’ve had it for 3 years until now”) is intellectually insulting and also somewhat of a slap in the face to the millions of pro-Oprah early adopters who helped give Twitter critical mass in the first place. “Those features that you used? New people don’t understand it, so we’re taking it away from you as well.”
Unbelievable. The only ‘good’ thing I’ve gotten out of this is that they at least backtracked a bit and admitted the real reason (technical/engineering) sooner rather than waiting a few more weeks.
Typical of the “elite squad” complaining about a platform making it easier to use for everyone.
The platform doesn’t belong to anyone but Twitter – sooner the “power players” that think it does realize this, the better.
Or, just follow Scoble to Friendfeed.
Couldn’t agree more about this being a PR blunder of the highest order. These Johnny-Come-Lately companies, no matter how popular they are, seem to think they are immune to the physics of business. See: Facebook.