Wow. Twitter has responded yet again to the whole @replies fiasco (that’s now four posts for those keeping score at home). Once again, this one is juicy. To be frank, this is exactly the post Twitter should have put up from the get-go. But it didn’t, and that led to this whole mess.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone leads off by talking about the confusion among users about the change that was actually made. This was of course entirely Twitter’s fault and Stone doesn’t back away from that. “I did not do my homework,” he says, and noting the company screwed up from a communications perspective. True.
Stone then goes into what exactly the problem is, and it’s two-fold: First from a product design perspective, the @replies system never really made sense for people you don’t follow. While the default setting was to have this feature off, some 3% of users turned it on, but at times would be confused about it. The second problem remains the more pressing one: The 3% of users who did turn this on were straining Twitter’s servers. This is because every time someone would @reply someone else, Twitter had to scan the entire system to see who had what setting turned on to see which update to place in which timeline. Makes sense.
It’s still not entirely clear what Twitter’s solution for this is going forward. Stone notes that “we cannot turn this setting back on in its original form for technical reasons and we won’t rebuild it exactly the same for product design reasons.” But he does say that the use cases people loved about the feature will be returning “new and improved.” That seems to suggest an entirely new feature (option 2 from the Twitter post yesterday).
I’m still concerned that this new feature will complicate Twitter in a Facebook-style way, but we’ll see. At least they’re saying the right things today. Even if I’m not entirely convinced that by Stone saying he didn’t do his homework on the technical side, he’s not more or less using the old “the dog ate my homework” excuse for Twitter as a whole here.
I was one of the 3% so you can “blame Scoble” for this one. Now I know why Twitter didn’t put me on the recommended follower list, too. Technically difficult. Heheh.
“Now I know why Twitter didn’t put me on the recommended follower list, too”
Get over yourself Robert.
is hard to get over ones self once you have become so big in your mind.
Twitter is run by silly rabbits. I mean everyone else knows how to ask their community but the people in power of the hottest community doesn’t know how to communicate… great.. Twitter needs a social media branding guru.. I hear there are plenty on twitter. Hey STONE pick one.. My name is Owen JJ Stone and your making us look bad!!
I am still sticking with my previous stand. Especially if we have the numbers now. How can you say that Twitter did anything wrong when only 3% of the population was using this feature.
If only 3% of your population was doing something that was taxing your system beyond belief, you’d can it immediately. I do not fault Twitter for this and just because we’re on TechCrunch and make up half of that 3% doesn’t mean we are right. Sorry.
No need to be so grabby. We already blame you for enough.
Mr Scoble not on the recommended follower list? I surely know why…
Could you please take a moment to explain why, i don’t think it’s as bad as you put it.
This whole #fixreplies fiasco has been handled extremely poorly by Twitter. They need to be more on it and while @biz recognizes that, I still feel that not addressing this issue is a major design flaw by the twitter team.
I dunno. I think ya’ll got your panties all in bunch over something that’s ridiculously silly when you think about. Did you know there are starving children all over the world? People without access to clean drinking water dying every day? And the only thing you people can talk about is that twitter took away your non-following replies? It’s a sad, sad world.
I was pretty close, my tweet from the other night after the feature was removed: http://twitter....atus/1781577066
I was closer.
Man, it should really worry all the alleged web experts here that a guy with an anthropology degree figured out the database issues before they did.
Give me 1/10th of the venture funding that twitter has received and my site will be profitable and wont go down for maintenance during peak hours.
I’m just say’n….
Bottom line is he stepped up to the plate and admitted that they screwed the pooch. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. I’m sure they’ll sort it out and communicate in a way that won’t get them nailed to the wall in the future.
Great move forward. Communication is where it all starts.
You know, it’s sorta amazing that not very long ago if a company didn’t respond to its customer’s complaints within a reasonable period (reasonable period meaning days to weeks or longer), they suffered the pain of losing their customer base.
Now folks are complaining because Twitter didn’t respond within enough hours.
Yeeesh. How about a little PATIENCE people.
“screwed the pooch” goes well with the pic on this story.
Is anyone really surprised? I’m not. Technical issues should be expected with growth of the magnitude seen with Twitter. Further, it’s a free service. Are we now saying that free isn’t good enough? That it must work perfectly, as well.
I agree with you. And as per what the posts above say, I think we need to give some space for mistakes, and exercise some patience. It isn’t as if the people at Twitter don’t know or are denying there’s a mistake and that they aren’t doing anything to rectify it. Maybe our digital savviness has just spoilt us to the point that we need instant gratification and solutions for everything. But even the digital systems that we use are still run by humans behind them.
Please, Please, Please, No more twitter posts. Please!!!
How does it bother you so much that there are a lot of posts about Twitter? How hard is it to not read them? Do you obsessively read posts you don’t care about or something?
Yeah, this story is dead. The previous blog post summed it up nicely. It was clearly a half-assed attempt to unnecessarily put a positive spin on a small issue. Looks like @ev learned so let’s all move on to more noteworthy topics like how we can all save money on our phone bill by not voting for the American Idol winner since it’s all decided…
Ok, maybe not the best topic to move to…
Wait, so one global real-time chatroom for the entire planet isn’t going to scale? Who knew.
yes, but why it has to be like that?
just let it open, so no need for server the search it’s database,..
Are you suggesting Twitter stop filtering @replies at all? Bad idea — that would screw the 97% of users who don’t want to see every @reply.
A computationally-simple solution is useless if it hurts nearly all the users. That’s why Twitter started filtering @ replies! (Remember, @replies are an “after-feature” coded in after people starting using the @reply convention — originally they were visible to everybody, and Twitter had to start filtering to make streams readable for people who weren’t interested in half-conversations.)
Couldn’t have said it better myself!! If they go through with this “explicitly click reply button” fix it’s going to hurt the 97% of people and half of the 3% will still be unsatisfied. I agree that this was a MASSIVE scalability issue but they need to sit back and take some time to think of a good solution.
3%?
3%?? and we get a hundred or so posts from tech crunch, and two different trending topics on twitter over this.
3%? jeesh people, you need to get over yourselves.
it is too much Twitter on Techcrunch or should I say Twittcrunch?
Haha.. Seriously. Those product design flaws are not difficult to fix, and this solution is quite simple:
http://bit.ly/confusion
Twitter uses a lot of unnecessary technical jargon on their site and on their help pages. Doesn’t really help.
“All @replies” sounded good. “No @replies” sounded scary. Why not call the three different modes more straight-forward things like “Quiet” “Standard” and “Noisy”?
And they should hire (more) user interface designers.
Wow. You have completely not understood what the problem is. The problem is that a feature only used by 3% of users is sucking up a disproportionate amount of server resources. A better help page won’t change that.
Techcrunch is entirely too whiney about twitter. If there is one more post about this “issue” that 3% of twitter users might care about, I am unsubscribing from techcrunch.
for that matter if there is one more twitter post in the next week, you’ve lost a reader
I am sick of twitter stories. And this whole “twitter” input field on the comments form is just sickening.
wow. all this from only 3% of users. don’t waste your time twitter. stick to your guns!
twitter sucks
agreed twitter is pretty lame and TC does not even follow through with what they said they like make love to twitter in their stories
Dude do your research and tell about other innovative companies. You just keep on writing about Twitter.. yaaaawwwwnnnnnnn
I visit Techcrunch daily but lately my interest is waning… 50% of topics are about Twitter…
I agree Twitter is revolutionary but please go checkout more companies….
I wonder what was ur job description….
Twitter++
TwitterSharp
The reason this feature is hard for them to enable is that they couldn’t engineer their way out of a wet paper bag.
If I was in charge there I’d fire the entire engineering team and start over. Talk about fail.
I still don’t get it..
If someone who I follow, replies to someone who I don’t follow, then I will not see the reply?
Pretty ridiculous if you ask me… if I follow someone I want to follow all of his/her tweets (without visiting the profile). In this way, I could also meet a few new people, who might share the same interests as I do…
Biz’s posts are still insulting. 3% of users switching from the default is a *lot*. 3% of Twitter’s users is a *lot*.
And the technical issue doesn’t really make sense. The regular Twitter behavior is that followers see all tweets. The @reply behavior is an *exception*!
Two things:
1) Stop whining about the Twitter posts here. It’s not about Twitter itself (I assume), Tech Crunch covers Twitter because of all the start ups and developers circling around the thing and building on it.
Forest through the trees guys …
2) I liked Biz’s reply here. He messed up, he said he messed up, he attempted to explain himself, it’s time to move on.
Well, I am part of this so called 3% of early adopters/ power users that made the product interesting in the first place. And I feel upset that they choose to go with the “lets-dumb-it-downm-enough-so-oprah-viewers-can-understand-it” path.
There is a reason I had so carefully handpicked the 30 or so people I *follow*: I want to read *everything* they have to say, is it really that difficult to understand this use case?
Now because people think that they have some obligation to follow-back every single spambot or lifeless frequent updater that follow them, and end up overloading themselves with too much information, they offer to hide some reply updates for this people that don’t know how to use the unfollow button!
Anyways, I will keep asking them to reconsider and fix the replies, I have even made a greasemonkey script to help me with that
Video demo of the script here: http://vimeo.com/4658603
I agree.
Further, simplicity rules in the favor of everyone seeing everyone’s @’s. You follow someone? You see their tweets. Simple.
Based on blog.twitter.com, my understanding is that the database strain comes from the checking of the user’s preferences before displaying messages containing @’s. This seems silly. I’m not a database programmer, but I’d suspect there’s probably a more efficient way of engineering that would prevent this being a double strain. Perhaps this is still a carry over from the original “official @” implementation on top of the base system. (For those unfamiliar with the early [good ol'] days of twitter, the @ system wasn’t a system at all, originally.)
The 3%. I am highly suspicious of this number. What is the percentage of active users (let’s say, greater than 1 tweet / day) using the “see all” option, vs. the percentage of active users using the “hide some” option?
Finally, some replies in advance to detractors of my view to make “show all” the simple, default, solution?
* “Show all” is still the simplest solution, if simple is in fact what we are worried about.
* What ever happened to the etiquette that was “if an @ reply conversation runs long, move it to direct message”?
* If there’s really too much noise, then why not unfollow the noisy ones?
* I’m aware some people have turned hash tags into a cludgy chat. This is interesting; certainly greater technological solutions exist, but interesting none the less. Websites exist that will “mute/snooze” someone you follow by unfollowing and refollowing after a period of time. Again, I’m not a database programmer, but I suspect that a “mute” and/or “snooze” feature could be implemented with _relatively_ little effort.
Thanks,
- tollie
Handled poorly or not, we’re all going to stay Twitter’s addicted users. Aren’t we?
Not if they don’t fix the replies, or if they make other Facebook-size screw ups. It’s *that* annoying when social networking sites take away the things that make them useful and interesting – be it @ reply options, or be it the quasi-intelligent Home Feed (the predecessor to Facebook’s twitter-wanna-be stream).
Do you write any articles other than twitter? Looks like you have some underhand deals with them . Shame on you. Grow up and write something useful
If you want a simple viral and effective way to get followers try… http://bit.ly/rYCMD
You can still follow conversation between your followings and others if you use friendfeed + twitter. Is too easy to add Twitter accounts in friendfeed, they have an automatic app to do that.
Several people have notice a lot more friendfeed notifications of new friendfeed’s followers.
Sorry if I don’t write English very well
.
Yup, another BS twitter story.