Twitter just went through an awful 24-hour stretch. It included taking away a feature some people loved, probably being misleading about it, getting a huge amount of backlash, halfway bringing the feature back, and getting railed by the press for it all — with bouts of downtime mixed in for good measure.
This is hardly the first time Twitter has had everyone up in arms, and it won’t be the last, but it’s pretty astonishing how the company seemed to solve one problem by creating two more. Sure, it’s easy to play desk-chair quarterback, and probably a bit unfair — but it’s also fun, and a good cautionary tale, so let’s do that.
Here’s how the past 24 hours at Twitter went down:
Problem 1: Twitter yanks the option to see @replies directed towards people you don’t follow.
Why it was odd: Because it was just an option, and not the default setting. Users will never like options being taken away from them. Why remove an option? Well, we’ll get to that.
Problem 2: Twitter writes a blog post explaining that the change will “better reflect” how people use Twitter. It claims this is based on usage patterns and feedback.
Why it was odd: Has Twitter learned nothing from Facebook over the past few years? If you’re going to make a change, even if you’re sure it’s the right one, let the users know before you do it. That’s true even if you have no intention of listening to feedback — which may also be the right play, more on that later.
Problem 3: Prominent Twitter employees start tweeting about their distaste about the change. This includes tweets of uncertainty from CEO Evan Williams.
Why it was odd: If you really are making what you think is the right call, don’t waffle — and especially don’t waffle on the service you created to let everyone see your thoughts in public. Users will pick up on this waffling, smell blood and go in for the kill.
Problem 4: Twitter writes a post the next day containing the following sentence, “The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt…”
Why it was odd: This absolutely should have been in the first post on the matter. Hell, it should have been the key subject of the first post. Now it just seems like Twitter was being purposefully misleading about the reason it removed the option. I was at dinner the previous night discussing this change. Everyone at the table agreed it was clearly done for scaling purposes, if we all knew that, why did a co-founder of the company have to be “reminded” about it? He didn’t. It was just a mistake not to be honest about that upfront.
Problem 5: Twitter goes down for its scheduled maintenance, the second such one during the middle of a work day, in a week.
Why it was odd: Poor timing. Users wanted to discuss this new post and give feedback to Twitter via Twitter, but could not.
Problem 6: Twitter follows up that second blog post with a third post just a few hours later saying it is halfway reverting the changes.
Why it was odd: Halfway doing something is never a good idea. If you change something or don’t change something you will piss off some people, but if you half change something, you’ll piss off all those people.
Problem 7: These changes appear that they will make the service much more complicated.
Why it was odd: Keep it simple, stupid. That’s how Twitter was born, how it grew and why it is what it is. Twitter is trying to placate its users with these convoluted changes — that is just not a good idea in my book. Do or do not, there is no try.
Problem 8: A server failed, making Twitter unusable for several hours.
Why it was odd: Insult to injury.
A bad day: It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback, but it’s also no stretch to say that Twitter badly mishandled this situation. It’s not entirely clear if it was the very small percentage of users using the feature (3%, according to Twitter API lead Alex Payne), or if it was the taxing of Twitter’s servers that led to the decision of the removal. It was likely a combination of the two that was borne out of the latter. But that needed to be stated from the get go.
Removing an option, no matter what percentage of users use it, generally doesn’t seem like a good idea. Those who do use it, clearly love it, and others probably like the idea of having that option as a safety blanket of sorts, just in case they ever want to use it. That’s not to say it can’t be done — but if you’re going to do it make sure you’re 100% committed to removing it.
At the end of the day, the product is yours and you should be the ones making the call on which features stay and which ones go. It’s of course good to listen to your users, but most of them probably have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to your product, so it should almost never go beyond listening. If it does — as it did today with Twitter — there’s clearly a problem.
A plan that wasn’t thought through will lead to these types of days. Of course, Facebook has had plenty of these, as has Digg and so has Twitter (on a much smaller scale) — apparently, history repeats itself. Who knew?
In terms of the actual feature removal, I’m up in the air about it. I kind of like the idea of simplifying my stream by removing @replies to users I don’t follow. I might miss that at first, but eventually I’d forget it was ever an option. At the same time, it is a good discovery tool — especially for new users.
But what absolutely needs to happen is very clear to me: Twitter needs to either kill it completely or bring it back completely. 
When you start introducing conditional statements into the equation, it very quickly complicates things. That has never been what Twitter is about and should not be what it becomes about. As I said, it’s their product, but in my opinion, that would be a mistake.
But what has me even more worried is the longer term second solution. You know, the new feature talked about in the third post that will give users “far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow.” That sounds a lot like the convoluted social tangle Facebook has created due to the privacy concerns of its users. As an asymmetric social network, Twitter shouldn’t have those issues.
But there’s a potential ray of hope in this second solution: Filters. I want Twitter to keep the service simple and stay bare-bones, but it really needs a high level way to filter the people you follow. Yes, other services do this, but having it on Twitter actual could eliminate the concern about too much noise in @replies. It is working beautifully for FriendFeed, and is starting to work for Facebook.
There’s a way to redeem yourself from today’s fiasco Twitter: Remove all data restrictions and simply give us filters. But maybe don’t listen to me — I’m just another user bitching, after all.
Nice end to end summary of this complete FAIL episode. On the bright side, I’ve added ’serendipitous discovery’ to my vocabulary holster.
So many problems with twitter and yet MG is not ready to try out WallPipe ( http://www.wallpipe.com ).
Best opportunity for TC to shove Twitter into deadpool and get on with life..
This Anand, you are not supposed to use techcrunch for obvious reasons. If you are an adult, u should be knowing this already!
it was me who first suggested this twitter/friendfeed should make filter groups, in TC comments. But only 1% people will take up trouble of creating friend groups. So best KISS option would be filters:
-main, all following
-two way follows (common subset of both followers and following)
-non-followers following(i.e. following -followers)
My site is “Tech crunchies”, which going by the content pretty much makes sense…No way, inspired by TC..read the disclaimer in the about section..
wallpipe looks like the site i built ten years ago. maybe that’s why…
Peter, you’re hillarious. That site is awesome, I haven’t seen anything that laughable in years.
fuck Titter… Assholes at TEchcrunch, they havent got any other thing to write about… Clowns…..
Please enough about Twitter – everytime I read Techcrunch there are 2 or 3 postings about it…. it just feels out of proportion!
agreed …TC too much focus on twitter
Speaking of which, there’s a talk from a Twitter engineer tomorrow at JellyTalks in SF.
Twitter has international users you know. It’s perfectly convenient for me if they decide to do maintenance in the middle of your work day when I’m asleep. Just saying.
Other than that, good article.
Fair enough. Thanks.
Great post MG. Finally a thorough analysis of the Twitter situation – the problem areas, pros & cons. You have rightly pointed out Twitter’s sloppy way of handling this situation. Why would one fumble when you have to make a call on your product? As you say, listening to all users is not a possibility. Better if Twitter takes cue from this post at least when it does a next update/adds/removes features.
+1
Thanks for mentioning us non americans
Still, there aren’t many of us: with 800 and so followers, I am among the top 50 Twitter users in Switzerland! The rest of the world has a bit of catching up to do (and it will be more and more difficult with the increasing complexity of Twitter…)
Well done Tom and Arnaud….come on guys… stop being so americentric ffs. There are more than 3 timezones in the world.
Problem 1 is misstated.
There’s been too much focus on the discovery quality to having the all @replies feature on – while it’s powerful and I’ve used it to organically find most people I follow, it ignores the strength of it being a featuer of simply folloing what the people you follow say – even if it is just one part of a conversation. If somebody says “I’m on the train” in a reply – I might care about them being on the train but not about who it’s being said to.
Exactly! People keep missing that point. The power and simplicity of “show me everything that anyone I am following says, regardless of who they say it to” seems to me to be the entire point of Twitter. By seeing a so-called “one-sided” conversation, we discover things that we would never think to ask about or search for.
If Twitter thinks that this is all about finding new people to follow and decides that the solution is a “recommendation engine” for finding new followees, they will have jumped the shark completely.
lol @ twitter… keep it simple stupid! now they learned a lesson.
Virtually acquire twitter on http://www.webm...com/twittercom/
Webmilker… That is quite possibly the dumbest idea for a site I have ever seen. I hope you get sued.
I am sure he will recieve the lawyer letters soon.
“Problem 1: Twitter yanks the option to see @replies from people you don’t follow.”
AIUI, that’s not quite right. They yanked the option to see @replies *to* people you don’t follow.
Good call, updated that wording.
Didn’t I call that? *sulks”
This just proves how convoluted things have gotten with this setting. I first figured this out about 6 months ago, and had since recommended to people to go with “all @ replies”. The point is NOT about volume alone as was pointed out further up, the point is that there IS NO TELLING which tweets will contain something valuable.
To dismiss @ replies out of hand as “undesirable” (a tad bit Orwellian, no?) just because we weren’t following the receiver goes way too far, and I agree with AHell and SJMorton that it kind of goes against Twitter’s open architecture/spirit.
Plus, there’s already DMs for private communication. I also don’t see how doing the extra DB lookup for (”is XYZ following both sender AND receiver”) is saving them server load, if anything, it should be adding to it.
Just do a straight look-up by “following” and give us the full data stream, any further filtering can be done from there.
This just in…TC is still all over Twitters nuts…
Good job MG. Great analysis of the situation. Now I know why Evan Williams should seek advice from you. I’m sure he will. (Having written so much about Twitter, I think you have become a Twitter-expert).
Thanks for the details.
This change definitely takes a good deal of fun out of Twitter and the ability to join interesting conversations already in progress. I consider Twitter sort of a water cooler environment where you get an audience with lots of interesting people you might not otherwise talk with. Now that they are essentially shunning outsiders to the conversations, it spoils one of Twitter’s best features.
Closed source companies like twitter, facebook, myspace, and frindfeed do not have to listen to what the users that generate value for them say. This is because you, the user that have given your content and helped put money in the closed source companies pockets own nothing…Not even the content that you have added to thier silos….Try to easlity export your content to test this out….Becuase you the closed source application user does not have any ownership of the application, the “owners” can do what they want….And becuase the twitter application is closed source, the owners never fear the possiblity that you might create your own version with the fetaures that you want. You might not do this, but I beleive the fact that you could would have a dramatic effect on the how companies treated the users tha gave them their billion dollar valuations.
Closed source applications like twitter, facebook, myspace, and frindfeed by their nature assume that you the user are a stupid child like slave that needs to be told what is good for you. Closed source companies like twitter, facbook, myspace, and frindfeed by their nature create the framework of a share cropping system where you the user/content creator work their fields, and obediently follow their rules.
True, william. As I’ve noted here before, Twitter is the bottled water of the internet. It adds nothing technically to what we had before, relying entirely on marketing and UI to get people to perceive it as new. Anything that can be done with twitter could have been done with email in 1980. All of its ‘unique’ discovery features stem from the fact that all the traffic goes through its own servers. Google or Microsoft could offer the same services to GMail or Hotmail users virtually overnight. The only impediment for them is marketing. Twitter is a marketing phenomenon, not a technology.
Michael, yours is the best analysis of Twitter I’ve ever read.
I disagree. Twitter is not a marketing phenomenom. The word marketing assumes that there is a business plan which of course there is not. It intrigues me that we are now criticizing the design of a service that has cost the developers 10’s of millions to give us at no charge. If you want something changed – well go and pay for it. Many players in the market considered the Twitter type service over the last decade, but they all came to the same conclusion. The one to many feature, coupled with viral distribution will cause scaling and financial issues, so best to leave to to some other poor fool who is naive to think it’s bankable. I say “give the poor naive guys who created Twitter a break” Put yourself in their shoes. They’re burning $100,000’s per day – and rising; they can’t think of any way to make money. They have to try to limit their scaling requirements
Egor
I find it hard to belive that the twitter UI and development work cost 10’s of millions. If you have any proff of this can you point me to it ?
I belive that with an open source tye solution the cost of development and possibly scale would be much smaller.
Twitter is not a technology company. They are a marketing play. There technolgoy could be and has been knocked off by very junior developers.
I believe that one of the philosophies of Open Source is that you should have the freedom to change the applcation to suite your needs as long as you make your changes availabel for the “Communutity”.
The twitter “community” does not have this freedom.
Try to take something back from someone who loved this features is a difficult step, is against “democracy”. But the walled garden ecosystems will show us every time how high is his wall. This when the control of data come from centralized systems – let the people decide ( this argumentation with 3% = 900.000 Twitter made this people unhappy yesterday !! )
I think this is a great example of what happens when you underestimate your user base. As soon as you start trying to fob them off with over-simplifications and “its for your own good”, you’re asking for trouble.
Mountain and mole hill come to mind, oh, and retarded.
When a company becomes big enough and important enough in people’s lives, the assumption is that it is a sentient entity functioning as a single perfectly aware mind. No. It is a bunch of guys, many of them new, trying to figure things out as they go. They found a technical problem, said “How can we fix this?” Came up with a solution. Bounced it off a few senior people, and then did it. It didn’t work, so now they will try something else. Does your company work any differently? Does your life work any differently? Why should Twitter?
Way to go all rational and logical on us
Sorry. I was there with a flaming torch yesterday.
Now that the fun has died down, I thought we should realize that there is no “Twitter”. There is a bunch of confused guys trying to ride this tiger.
Wow, man, I can really dig the philosophical rubicon you transmit from.
My spirit soul is getting a parking ticket…bummer
Leave filtering for the 3rd party applications.
I have one other thought. How much does Drag me To Hell pay to get that ad placement?
The 3% number is not something Twitter should build an argument around. I’d bet the vast majority of Tweeps were not aware of the option to see all @replies. They most likely assumed they were seeing every tweet from those they followed. If that option wasn’t hidden in the settings/notifications area, and was explained properly (and simply), many more would’ve chosen it. Bring back the Twitter of 48 hours ago, and that number could jump to 25% (that’s why Twitter won’t do it, scalability). Newer users and those with smaller follow numbers can easily get overwhelmed by power tweeters, but this is the norm. Everyone goes through this. And the simple solution is to give them the option to opt out of the all @replies, or they can unfollow heavy users to trickle down their stream.
Simple solution if you want to address a lot of the crap clogging up Twitter, and at the same time unleash a more valuable conversation river: shut down automated software schemes – Hummingbird a prime example – that enable asswipes to create unlimited ‘niche’ accounts that auto-follow (and auto-unfollow, auto-follow again) thousands with the push of a button. THIS is the real problem with Twitter. Why haven’t they dealt with it? Perhaps the large number of visits generated by these crap/spam accounts pumps up Twitter’s face value, the same way junk accounts pump up all the accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers (Techcrunch included). If you’re followed by someone with 90 tweets and 19,000 follows/followers, gee, how did that account get so big so fast?
Clean out the crap and let the real conversation fly, unfiltered if we so choose. THAT would be a decision the community would cheer.
Exactly. No updates, no follows. A few updates, a few follows. It’s easy to do, but they want millions of accounts. That hockey stick in membership numbers makes VCs … We’ll let’s just say they get aroused.
Ugh! Auto-followers created havoc on Twitter since January with hardly any response from Twitter at all even though they created as many bogus accounts to increase follower numbers as spammers did.
I have no idea why Twitter waited so long to give an inadequate response–1,000 following a day limit? who needs to follow this many new people per day?–to Internet Marketers and eCommerce people. It’s like they had a hands-off policy on these pests who overloaded the system and then pulled out this change yesterday? What wrongly placed priorities.
Not wrongly placed. Twitter is free. Founders have stock. Employees have options. Where do you think their priorities are? Where would your priorities be?
Putting meat in the icebox before it spoils.
Twitter is the wild west. It’s part of the secret sauce that makes Twitter great.
But enabling/allowing the Twitter equivalent of spammer e-mail harvesting with automated follow/account creation software might make the numbers look better short term, but it’s Kudzu in Twitterville. Easily 70 percent of new follows are complete crap, self proclaimed ‘internet marketing gurus/coaches’ using Hummingbird after getting a get-rich quick tutorial on how to create numerous accounts with fake tweets, profile pics and descriptions (and of course link bait to whatever they’re selling, in many cases the same software they’re using to do this).
What used to be enjoyable – checking the inbox to see new and interesting Tweeps that are connecting – has become a frustrating experience of sifting through all of these crap accounts (I don’t hesitate to block if it looks suspicious). Block is the new unfollow. It keeps them from unfollowing and refollowing again the next week, which they inevitably will.
Instead of dealing with this cancer, Twitter brass eliminates the ability to see all of the tweets of people I follow. Sheesh.
Wrongly placed priorities is ignoring aggressive Internet marketers pumping up their Follower numbers through their #FURR behavior (Follow, Unfollow, Rinse, Repeat) which was incredibly annoying & persistent and then making an unannounced change that affected ordinary users.
You’re right, it’s free. But its value comes from the loyalty and growth of its userbase. If they leave for another social network, Twitter’s value evaporates. Yes, Twitter Search can be a great tool for companies but only if there is a critical mass of Tweets to search.
The rate of growth of the largest Twitter accounts is already slowing down and Twitter has a terrible retention of new users (about 40%?) so it should care about accommodating the users who do stay, most of which become incredibly loyal and are basically offer enormous amounts of unpaid promotion for the Twitter brand.
I don’t even know if Twitter has a marketing and PR person as it seems like it is the users who sell other people on the value of signing up for accounts. You start ignoring what your loyal users want and the tide can quickly change. As the song says, “It’s a thin line between love and hate.”
What’s odd is to read Twitter’s staff Tweets yesterday and it sounds like just another day at the office, like there wasn’t a crisis going on (dah-dee-dum-dee-dah). Either Twitter staff don’t think it’s a big deal or employees were asked not to talk about it online.
I understand that as a company policy but it added a bit of surrealism to the situation, like the users were living in one universe while Twitter HQ was working in some other place where life went on as usual. To someone who didn’t work there, it seemed like a huge disconnect.
I think at the end of the day what bothered me as much as this change was pro-change folks complaining about the 2% of users who were whining about it. There were thousands and thousands of Tweets, dozens of blog entries and hundreds of comments. This clearly affected more than 2% of users and I don’t know if I would call rejecting a system change as merely whining. I’d call it a revolt.
Liz
Spot on
I didn’t see @Al3x’s Tweet you refer to in “Problem 3″ of the story, I was just browsing through the Tweetstreams of some other Twitter employees to see what staff members thought about the change.
Their popularity is their disadvantage here. The site is so popular, the second it goes down everyone is up in arms about it.
Twitter is a maturing company that got popular faster than they got mature. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and write this off as “growing pains.”
But then, I don’t live on twitter so none of these issues impacted me at all. I just think it’s an interesting example of a young organization dealing with mature-organization problems.
I LOVE TWITTER ARTICLES !!!!!!!
Jason Calacornus
http://www.twittercrunch.com
“Users will pick up on this waffling, smell blood and go in for the kill.”
For instance, they’ll write articles like this one?
DM
I hope they make their minds up re: steak sauces vs. ketchup.
Let’s not forget as we complain, it’s free people. You don’t have to pay for this service. I know it’s tempting to grumble , but it’s f-r-e-e.
unsubscribed.
tc reached a new low complaining about this stuff.
GET A LIFE!
banned
The fundamental problem is Twitter has no incentive to avoid days like this. Bad days make news. Any press is good press. People complaining adds to the impression that there are no alternatives.
What we need is a business model where people pay according to how good the service is. When they get bad service they send a message by paying less. It’s a radical idea, but I think it could work. More on my blog. Despite the date, this was no april fools joke: http://ourdoing...rtup/2009-04-01
TRUTH Is TW is having PERFORMANCE ISSUES.
This was a move to increase the site / service PERFORMANCE.
GETTING RID OF FEATURES is the ONLY WAY those IDIOT ENGINEERS know to “make the site faster”
Get a fucking clue Twitter Engineers. Getting rid of features is NOT THE FUCKING SOLUTION.
TRY:
1. Erlang
2. Infiniband
3. A fucking Clue
3. It was Mrs. Green and two femme bondage slaves in the basement with a camcorder.
^^ ouch another unsubscribed — now they will have to accept donations to pay for office rent.
You can blog from Mars if it’s free. Nada worry.
Twitted hates you.
Twitter hates itself, sad
You can’t be serious. Is this post just a joke of some kind ?
Now Twitter has international users we know. It’s perfectly convenient for us if they decide to do maintenance.
Enjoy the peace in Let’sTalk while having as many private and open chats as you want on isayusay.net, in text or in voice.
Why is it the social media co. seem to think whipping their users is smart? Regressing features is pretty well known to incite customers/users.
I look forward to assimilating MG. Our collective now uses twitter for all our updates.
期待ä¸ã€‚。。
The fear of “conditional statements” is overwrought. Twitter is nothing but conditional statements.
“Don’t show me a tweet unless I follow that person.”
“Don’t show me an @reply unless I follow both people.”
“Don’t accept direct messages unless I follow that person.”
“Accept @mentions unless I block that person.”
The average tweeter doesn’t care about which conditional statements are in effect; they care about whether their incoming stream is manageable. (And judging by the low adoption rate, and Twitter’s claims that adopters often got confused, most used found “all replies” to be not manageable.)
The new @reply conditional (”Don’t show me an @reply unless I follow both people or it starts a conversation.”) doesn’t affect manageablity enough to hurt average users.
How about techcrunch being awful over the last month with all these twitter stories. You guys sucks.
怎么没ä¸æ–‡ç‰ˆæœ¬å‘¢ï¼Œå°å¼Ÿè‹±æ–‡ä¸å¤ªå¥½å•Šã€‚
Our children will judge us harshly for the meaninglessness of these conversations.
There is no such thing as bad publicity, right? All of this may actually benefit Twitter in the long run.
Twitterã®ç†ç”±ã‚’複雑ã«ã™ã‚‹ã“ã¨ã¯ã‚ã‚Šã¾ã›ã‚“。ã”満足をç¶æŒã—続ã‘ã‚‹ç°¡å˜ã€‚ãŒå¤§ãã変化ã™ã‚‹ã«ã¯ã€ã‚¤ãƒŽãƒ™ãƒ¼ã‚·ãƒ§ãƒ³ã‚’屈æœã—ãªã„ã§ãã ã•ã„。
Don’t think you can go 24hrs without posting something about twitter, can you TC?
Dude… I’m starting to get sick of all the ranters ranting about TC and their attachment to Twitter. This is a BLOG retards, not a news agency. People are allowed to post what they are interested in in their blogs even if it gets somewhat repetitive. Would you rather TC be like AC and start suing everyone that they think stole a little piece of their pie? The fact is, everyone that reads this blog uses TC as a source for information or amusement/entertainment (the rants). If you don’t like these posts, then create a multimillion dollar tech blog yourself and see how you fair… Otherwise, stick to constructive criticism, or start arguing with Gene Burns @#$@#@$#!
Shaddap Simon Chan.
That’s all you can say? I dare you to do better.
p.s click on ponbon.im
itll make you feel better >: P
good article… however, i think what needs to be investigated is the number of people who actually even noticed that this debacle was taking place.. its probably guaranteed that 99% of the oprah, or ashton followers had zero idea (thats got to be indicative of the whole twitterverse)… its mainly just techcrunch and other tech news aggregater site readers that were following this.. so in the grand scheme of things only a tiny bit of the userbase was tuned in
MG: you are a total TWITTER FAN BOY…
You spend most if not all your working day talking/writing about twitter, then you go to dinner with REAL people and you talk about twitter?
“I was at dinner the previous night discussing this change. Everyone at the table agreed it was clearly done for scaling ”
GET A LIFE YOU TWITTER LOVER
Twiddle de dumb ……..
Isnt this really one of the most silly things ever heard of………???
@TwitterMyEgo – Who cares if you took two dumps and had McDonalds washed down with Star$$$???
And shame on TC for blogging about it……
Twitter is a bunch of twits to be honest…
You sould not post your SEO site when you only have a page rank of 2
I second that. call yourself retard viral. because that’s all you’re generating; retarded viral postings.
Problem #9: TechCrunch bites Twitter’s flimsy explanation whole-heartedly and calls into question whether they do anything more than shuttle corporatespeak to new audiences and slap ads on it.
I really agree with a lot that is said. I was getting really pissed off, but after skimming the #fixreplies thread, I backed off of it. There were so many idiots cussing. The service is free to use, so I just added my simple two cents and a blogging about my opinion, and just replied to those followers that I could actually talk with when I could see their stream…lol.
By the way, someone accused you of being a Twitter fan boy…that is quite alright.
I am a Twitter addict too so welcome aboard. 
More tuna juice. bleck
MG, I would only use my initials too if my journalism degree only got me so far as Twitter stories.
http://www.tunajuice.com
this is a pretty amazing blog post. good replay of twitter events and solid, honest insight on possible future directions with advice. seriously, you kicked ass here!
“listen to your users, but most of them probably have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to your product, so it should almost never go beyond listening.”
Great advice. Don’t listen to your customers. And if you do, don’t act on what you hear. Revolutionary new approach to business.
I’m with you, MG. Preposterous that the option was taken away. For those who don’t want to see other’s @ replies… then click on that option. What’s the big deal? Why take away the option from those who found it valuable?
Lame.
In the meantime, until twitter “fixes” this problem (that is… IF it is fixed) You can always find new interesting users talking about things with similar interests using groups based apps, like http://twubs.com…