Twitter management just shut off the method by which most serious Twitter users have found most of the folks that they're following.

And in the scale of importance, why doesn't twitter cut the all annoying AUTO DM feature. That I could understand (and appreciate). Maybe they are smoking too much of that twitter bud over there in twitter land.

Whatever the reasons, it greatly reduces the overall awesomeness of Twitter and yes, is asinine.

I'm bummed.

@misslizzyc

Be Well!
@ECS_Dave

Good riddance, I say.

@brickandclick

That setting had been a source of confusion for a while. For a long time I thought that is what controlled the ability for other people not in my network to reply to me, which is why I opted to show all replies. Once I realized my mistake, however, I switched it to replies in my network as an experiment. Some very conversational people did get extremely quiet, but that wasn't a bad thing. The absence of one-sided conversation created room for more people and I expanded my network as a result.

The ideal solution is not only giving each person control of the replies (both ways, so you can also opt to shut off reply spam), but to allow you to fine tune your network by controlling reply behavior for specific users. For my less chatty friends—and not everyone uses Twitter for conversation or wants to read chat—seeing all replies is desired. For large-network conversationalists, however, the filtering is helpful.

Seeing interesting conversations between a friend and a stranger is the primary way I find interesting folks to follow. (including @marshallk)

The only set of tweets this would make sense for would be for users responding to people with protected updates, and ONLY then because it is irritating to click over to see the other side of the conversation and get shut down. Only then.

Reminds me of the time when they took away SMS for a whole bunch of countries without prior warning..

See, I don't know why they bothered to do this update at all. When I signed up to Twitter last year, you could go to your settings and choose to either see all @replies of the people you are following, or only the @replies they make to people you also follow. If the former was so annoying to people, then they should have just changed their settings to the latter instead of getting rid of the option to choose what you preferred to see on your /home page altogether.

And excuse me, but when did they consult the Twitter population before making this decision? It sounds to me like a whole bunch of lazy morons didn't bother checking their settings to figure out how to turn @replies to people they don't follow off, and instead wasted effort complaining to Twitter management.

As for Nate (May 12, 2009 9:14 PM), fine if you didn't like the information overload on your own page, but some of us would prefer to have the freedom to choose.

Twitter uses 'replies' and 'mentions' inconsistently, which is unfortunate. When someone BEGINS a tweet with @username, that's a reply. When an @username appears anywhere else in a tweet, that's a mention.

Twitter's website Replies tab used to only show you actual replies; it now shows replies & mentions both, as do API clients. Regardless of your reply settings, you will continue to see mentions of your username.

The change today removes one setting -- the option to see all replies from people you follow, whether or not you follow the target -- that was originally implented in December 2007:

http://blog.twitter.com/2007/12/new-replies-settings.html

This can be thought of as 'discovery mode' (if you use it to follow new people), 'one-sided conversation mode' (if you find one-sided replies annoying), or 'promiscuous reply mode' (because I like saying 'promiscuous').

As of May 2008, this option was in use by less than 2% of Twitter users -- the default is, and has been, to see only replies to those you also follow:

http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/how-replies-work-on-twitter-and-how.html

Note Evan Williams' comment on the settings at the time, which clearly required a lot of explanation:

"This is obviously too confusing. We want to make some changes to make it more clear. We could clarify the setting. But my preference is to take out the setting altogether and just make it work like the default. That way, it works the same for everyone. (If you have strong opinions on this, leave a comment.)"

It comes down to a config change that has apparently been on the minds of Twitter management for about a year, and has now been implemented. Clearly there are some users who were very attached to this feature and are frustrated that it has been removed; I would be happy to see Twitter put it back in as an 'Expert' setting to allow these users to get the functionality they want.

For the vast majority of Twitter users, losing the extra setting is a non-issue; the only-following choice has been the default setting for a long time. If the UI for promiscuous mode is confusing enough to cause problems for the majority of users, there ought to be room for Twitter to clean it up without the torches and pitchforks coming out.

This requirement must have come from someone who wants to kill twitter.

I hope this is just a twitter bug which will go away soon.

@biz: 203 - 550,448
@cnnbrk: 6 - 1,447,150
@oprah: 11 - 975,813
@whitehouse: 64 - 71,750
@kingsthings: 53 - 260,319
@katiecouric: 76 - 22,983

etc. etc,. etc,

Has anyone considered the idea that the big wheels just don't have time for the noise. We are all noise to them. Power-useres have figured out a way to learn from the freely flowing information torrent but the Twitter swells can not be bothered with it.

As I read this change, now @cnnbrk only has to listen to 6 people and can megaphone out to a million and a half. @whitehouse, wouldn't you think it would be interesting to hear what the Twitter world is talking about? Larry, Katie, and Oprah just think it is something that they had to do so they wouldn't take the heat for being out of touch. @biz is either a one armed paper hanger or disengaged with Twitter and onto something else.

Me, I like to listen and learn through this conversation. How about you?

"The only set of tweets this would make sense for would be for users responding to people with protected updates, and ONLY then because it is irritating to click over to see the other side of the conversation and get shut down. Only then."

I follow over 1500 people, and it's hard enough keeping up with that. There is no way I can manage with promiscuous replies turned on (I've tried). I agree that you should have the option to see all replies, but there is a huge population of Twitter users (cf. Ev's 98% statistic) for whom this is the preferred mode and where promiscuous replies are not desirable.

:-)

If Ashton Kutcher complains, maybe they'll switch it back. But I'm guessing it's unlikely.

Bad, Twitter! Bad!

I'd bet that the only reason "2%" of users chose the now unavailable feature is that the vast majority assumed they were seeing 'all tweets' from people they followed. Once this all get out in the open, and Twitter returns this feature, it'll be more understood, and a few million people will choose it, and end up discovering a whole new piece of the conversation pie they were missing. Great way to discover new and interesting people your connections are chatting with.

@brickandclick

Maybe this is a way to try to limit the load on their servers until they can get a stop-gap in place?

The real question then is... Is it better to User Fail or Fail Whale?

I have had them turned on from the get-go and I do keep my follow list pruned to less than 200 folks, but you know which ones I boot when it comes time to cull the herd a little? The ones that never @ people I don't know...because discovering new people that I don't already follow is a huge part of the value I get out of following anyone.

I personally think it would be better to still leave the option, but give it a default of "only get replies of people you follow". This way, the average user won't bother changing the setting and most advanced users will understand what this is about.

Twitter is mainstream, they'll try to please the majority and make the platform as easy as possible to facilitate adoption.

While I definitely appreciate your explanation (though I was aware of it already), I still totally think Twitter is in the wrong. I follow about 1,000 people, many of whom are genuine thoughtleaders; my "home" feed is currently inundated with furious tweets about this incident.

So yeah, perhaps the masses aren't peeved, but those of us who use Twitter for more than just chatting certainly are. An "expert" feature is necessary. I don't mind the idea of being able to turn this on/off, but give me the option!

-Jillian

My biggest worry about this is the workaround: Tweets with characters right in front of the @ or mentioning folks mid-sentence break in-reply-to threading, making Twitter even less useful for conversation. So, yes, I'll be able to see the username one responds to once more, but there's a good chance there won't be any context, which is much, much worse.

I follow some smart people who engage in many conversations with many people. I do not want to follow all of their followers in order to benefit from the snippets of wisdom and excellent resources they provide via replies that I have been privy to thus far.

My hope is that Twitter power users (and everyone else) might consider changing their replies to mentions; that is, do not start replies with @username. If you like this suggestion, please share it via Twitter.

I mean carve out maybe 30 bucks out of the 55 million in VC money, add a checkbox in HTML. I think there's a tutorial or two out there.

As it was before, a Twitter user could choose which @replies appeared within their Twitterstream. What made Twitter believe they should make that decision for all their users and eliminate that control is beyond me. HUGE mistake. And right now, they're hearing about it from everyone...even at 1:24 am ET on a Wednesday morning.

True, another way to find these 'promiscuous' people is by reading the comments on articles like this (e.g. I'm now following @curthopkins because I liked his reply and his Twitter background), but it's not very scalable.

In an effort to work around Twitter's latest boner move, I will now preface reply Tweets with #bbp (Bring Back Promiscuity). http://tagal.us/tag/bbp (I see that someone has already defined #fixreplies, and I like it, but it's kinda long.)

But that wasn't enough for them. They found that critics like me kept talking back anyway, regardless of whether they follow-blocked, because we could just look them up in search or see them chatting to other people who were not so thin-skinned as to block followers (truly a stupid thing to do *on the Internet* -- for a while the devs even made all such searches by blocked followers showed up as locked accounts, but then they realized that truly was wrong on the Internet, because you could just put the searches into an RSS feed and read them on Google. Sigh.)

But...these types HATED seeing all those @ replies in their own vanity searches, then showing up in the even more prominent @ column -- they hated it when people "butted in" to conversations they were having with other people (not just A-listers, a lot of thin-skinned, irritable and paranoid types who aren't A-listers hated it to). Some of them REALLY got into a frenzy about anybody even asking them a question or demanding some accountability from them as public figures (see @craignewmark for example).

So they whined and pleaded, and if they had the devs' ears, they asked them at lunch -- hey, shut that off so we can just talk to our friends, you know, like an adult AIM or Facebook. So nobody but our friends that we WANT following us can read our special feted conversations. So we can get rid of "trolls".

See what happens when you behave that way? You kill off the one feature that made Twitter worth all its inanity: serendipity and search for interesting relevant conversations.

So @ajkeen and @stevegillmor got what they wanted. And Twitter jumped the shark, for sure.

Resist, resist, and resist!

True, another way to find these 'promiscuous' people is by reading the comments on articles like this (e.g. I'm now following @curthopkins because I liked his reply and his Twitter background), but it's not very scalable.

In an effort to work around Twitter's latest boner move, I will now preface reply Tweets with #bbp (Bring Back Promiscuity). http://tagal.us/tag/bbp (I see that someone has already defined #fixreplies, and I like it, but it's kinda long.)

PS I'm already following the aforementioned Michael, but I met him the old fashioned way: at beer and blog.

I wish Jaiku won this micro-blogging battle 3 years ago. It was so much better than Twitter.

http://www.raincityguide.com/2009/05/12/the-day-twitter-died/

But now that I'm seeing that the change was an attempt to "cure" promiscuity, maybe I should have called it, "The Day Twitter Put a Rubber On It".

So now there is an opening for a mashup by a 3rd party provider which combines the public feeds of all your friends (or just some of them perhaps)

"This is BS to force search and to drive up pageviews."

(and the rest of his tweet stream is pretty good on this as well...)

@drnormal
@strangelovelive

The episode 2 years ago is in fact what led to the settings about @replies (which have now been removed).

What about search option ?

everybody can search and read my replies !!

This has to be an opening for a twitterlike to start up offering what us twits need

http://www.twitter.com/oscarpbx

But when I read that mentions would still be visible, I wasn't so concerned.

Still, while some of my favorite people I now follow came from finding them through a conversation of one of my other friends, many of my friends on Twitter have come from hashtag "groups" I participate in regularly, like #HAHD and #MAMO. I'm still unsure if this change effects those interactions. If so, that would suck.

That would be like going to a tango or swing class and only being able to dance with people you know already.

~ Greg

I often don't realize that someone is on Twitter until they're replied to in a tweet. At the same time, I've stopped following a lot of celebrities simply because they reply to too many people (Stephen Fry, for instance). It'd be nice to have a middle-ground.

Barbara

Promiscuous @replies are only filtered out if "@steeroy" is the first word of the tweet, right? So when you reply to people, say "to @steeroy" instead. I will still see it because it's a mention, and your followers will all still see it because it's not a reply.

Grrrrrr

So yes it matters users says what they think, and it matters a LOT if tweeter LISTENS for their own business sake.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ROBERT PATTISON IN VANCOUVER
MAY 13 HE TURNS 23 GOOD FOR HIM MR. SEXY BRITISH BOY

goodness. i am gonna go out on a limb. ITS A COST CUTTING MEASURE. everything is always to save bucks. their servers are probably overloaded.

in the words of Grease 2 with Michelle Pfeiffer "just when I found you, I lost you". seriously. right now i would like to organize the twit better but i would rather have TOO many than too few. if you have too many you can just kill off some ppl.

thanks to the following for sending out and advising:

RT @ gillianshaw
RT @raincoaster
RT @stephenhui
RT @rww

Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew (Updated) http://bit.ly/PCSGc

Crazy!

I'm sure they have established enough momentum to 'survive' if they make it mainstream, but as has already been said, this is how most 'serious' users (and hence those who are really advocates for it too) find each other..

# @ev @biz Lance Armstrong just posted this for everybody to read, but WE CAN'T read it because of the @ ban http://tinyurl.com/odmev812 minutes ago from web

# @ev @biz Also consider that people leave valuable info in their @ reply14 minutes ago from web

# @ev @biz Now, suddenly @SI_PeterKing and all his valuable info is gone from Twitter, unless I click on his page every few minutes or use RSS16 minutes ago from web

# @ev @biz For instance take Sports Illustrated's NFL writer @SI_PeterKing. *ALL* his tweets begin with @ replies to important questions...17 minutes ago from web

# @ev @biz The problem is the @ function is *CHOCK FULL OF VALUABLE INFORMATION..**18 minutes ago from web

# @biz @ev I follow many famous people like @richeisen and @si_peterking whose only tweets are @ replies. How am I supposed to read them now?

Of course I want to hear when some of the peopl I follow talk to people I don't follow. That's half - no 2/3 - the way I use Twitter.

@Michael, what's your Twitter name ? )

Today I can see more then 10 things that could be changed for the better. Both for users, but also for for 3rd party developers who tries to code for the mishmash of API.
Ye, I know, Twitter started as an SMS service, but it has outgrown that user base due to smart phones and the mobile web, so maybe they should start focusing on the 'real' market instead.

Don't get me wrong, I

I miss Pownce ;(

Also, your "hamsandwich" example has highlighted a semantics issue: in that example the user isn't "replying", they are informing followers that a user is doing something - they are merely including the user in a tweet. That's where perhaps another tag is required. Perhaps the following:

Reply tweet:
"@person Yes I agree"

User included tweet:
"+person has just come in the room"

The + would convert the user text into a link to view profile info, but would not be a reply.

I also wrote some ramblings about twitter and such here: Squawking of design

When I first joined Twitter, that's what I believed Twitter should be used for. I was really disappointed with all of the @ replies I was seeing; I considered it 'spam' to a certain extent. Yes, Twitter is considered a social platform, but had a very specific function. Yes, the @ reply functionality was purposeful, but detracted from the experience I was expecting.

Now, several months later, I could say that using Twitter on an often more-than-too-regular basis has opened up the experience to different expectations. Engaging followers and other users has become a staple to the 'exhibitionism' (as many Twitter critics claim) that I partake in, and as of late, has been the primary usage I 'exhibit'.

The concept that social networks need to understand is that they exist because of their users, and it seems they often fail to appreciate that. While they originally offered a product for a specifically outlined purpose, the users will develop expectations towards the direction and functionality they expect from a product.

I recently read a post about how social networks cannot give in to demands of their users and need to be assertive in making their decisions, without input. While I see merit in that, it is not a matter of all or nothing. There needs to be a balance struck between needed and purposeful organisational decision making while still gathering input from the user base that they rely on.

I hate to mention it, but despite Facebook frequently making design changes that irritate the populous with Facebook's lack of gathering input, they took a step in the right direction with their recent Terms Of Service campaign (despite it being led up to via a public outcry).

So, yes, Twitter may still have expectations for what direction their product takes and they do have that right, after all. Whether they heed suggestions about what users that utilize the product do or would find appealing is a pseudo-moral issue.

@Jim: I agree.

2nd: "Expert setting": Yes. Paying for something that has been free before: No. (But I want the "see all replies" option back as it was very useful and the main edge twitter has over facebook)

Today is a day where we can see people who normally don't complain, complain about #fixreplies

Which is really quite a statement :)

Interesting to see what Twitter will do.
Because if they don't do anything, some other applications might just catch them unaware and rise above them in time to come.

That's backwards. If you don't like the service, you can stop using it.

If you want to continue using the free service, and they change something, you can either stop using it or complain about the changes.

Personally I would rather stick up for my opinion that one was is better and complain about the changes. Better than not using it.

If you don't want to hear people's complaints, get off the Internet.

"@barackobama NO, I don't want to be a Supreme Court justice, please stop DM-ing me. Don't make me unfollow you."

please dont try to tell me this was a joke purely meant for Barack Obama.
or this

"@ElAcordeonachi let me know that I was just referenced on "Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!" Guess I've finally made it!"

where a person is being credited rather than being privately thanked

or this

"@oprah Hey, I met you on some TV show back in 1984. What you been doing since then?"

which is clearly a public funny, rather than a private remark

For goodness sakes #fixreplies
All those remarks were intended for ALL of Weird Als followers.. quite plainly

Get a grip and DON'T KILL TWITTER

(via @shbadr)

I have now confirmed with a friend that he does NOT see a retweet which my client made "in reply" to another tweet. As the "@name" part is in the middle of the retweet, the @name can't be the reason so that it is an "in reply to" tweet which replies to someone he does not subscribe must be the reason why he does not see it.

Apparently there is some confusion. As it appears the change has nothing to do with "@-replies" or at which position in the reply the "@name" is written. It is my observation that what matters is if the tweet is just a tweet which contains "@name" or if the tweet is "in reply to" another tweet.

I have now confirmed with a friend that he does NOT see a retweet which my client made "in reply" to another tweet. As the "@name" part is in the middle of the retweet, the @name can't be the reason so that it is an "in reply to" tweet which replies to someone he does not subscribe must be the reason why he does not see it.

I do, however, dispute that the 2% is all that meaningful. How many other default options are changed by more than 2%? Question is, is that 98% number a result of people liking that option all that much, or because its the default?

It really doesn't matter if you find "interesting people" faster or slower because you, your whole 250 years old hegemony is over.
Shortening urls will not help either, there is no innovation in the past 10 years. More precisely there is a continuos decline of Western Civilization since WW1.

Twitter is just the last convulsion before death. And it is common for your breath to be ever faster before you eventually die.

The best example is the current mess because it is still not clear what kind of replies this affects. Most people seem to think that it affects so called "@-replies" which start with "@name". But as i have said above, it appears that the factor is not "@-replies" but "in reply to" replies. So twitter hat two types of replies which differ in how they work and what they imply. Bad usability design.

Another example: I still don't get why the list of the people i follow is labeled as "following_me". Thats just plainly wrong, it is not a list of people "following me". When you feel to have to use a short label even "me_following" would have been much more intuitive and understandable.

However, here is another alarming realization which I may be duplicating, but I really nee to be asleep and this is my last act before doing so.

Many people (including, btw, twitter in their "update" about this situation) are talking about this by using mentions in the body of the tweet instead of @replies at the beginning.

What this is effectively doing is putting every @reply in the public stream so that those who do NOT want all @replies will have to deal with them regardless. The removal of this OPTION that people did not HAVE to opt-in to is going to be ultimately bad for everyone

This does have the effect that now everyone sees all "replies" even if they don't want to. I dunno, tough, basically. It's twitter's fault.

It's all about control, it's all about the fact that Twitter has many people very nervous, powerful people, wealthy people, people who like being in control. These people see Twitter as a threat to their control, and they can't tolerate that so they began quietly acquiring control, first behind the scenes and then eventually buying it out entirely so that they can retain their control over the information flow.

Few people listen to me when I complained about the loss of the EVERYONE BUTTON, and the ability to randomly choose and interact with people. This is just the next step down that road, the next step in mutating Twitter into nothing more than another corporate money making device, where real people aren't really welcome any longer.

Just sit back and say nothing, don't speak out or complaint, don't tell your friends, and before you know what Twitter will be dead completely. Reduced to nothing more than a wasteland for marketers and spammers and scam artists.

RISE UP! RISE UP my Tweeple, RISE UP and THROW DOWN your OPPRESSORS!

Sic semper Tweetranus! (thus always to twitter tyrants) just remember where the real power flows from, what keeps the wheels of this whole damn world turning, WE THE PEOPLE, we the little people.

And if they don't want to listen, if they don't want to acquiesce to our demands, we can always play the trump card, because we always have that power, and that is why they fear us so. To those destroying Twitter let me send a small reminder as to exactly who you're messing with, 1789 Mickey Fickeys 1789 :-)

As i said, i've confirmed what i claimed as well. I made a retweet which was send as "in reply" to the original tweet. This retweet was not visible to one of my subscribers who do not subscribe the person which tweet i was retweeting. The text of the retweet was like "RT @originalnick content". People who do not subscribe to "originalnick" do not see this retweet, if it is "in reply to". Try it for yourself.

I've hacked my twitter client to make retweets not "in reply to" and now my retweets can be seen by all of my subscribers again. But i don't feel that this is a fault of my client.

"I'm at a party and I'm only allowed to hear the people (& replies to people) that I already know. Now I will never have the chance to meet interesting new people through the discovery of interesting snippets of conversation."

And (jeez, I'm not going to get any sleep), as someone else posted in Get Satisfaction, they have turned off ALL the options, not just the all @replies. People who didn't want ANY @replies have had that choice removed from them as well.

But, although I don't miss the feature it's clear that plenty of people do.

Twitter claim the option was confusing to users. Surely the solution is to find a way to explain the options more simply, not just remove an option that a lot of people really value.

Bad call, Twitter.

I agree with comments up there:
"...I follow some smart people who engage in many conversations with many people. I do not want to follow all of their followers in order to benefit from the snippets of wisdom and excellent resources they provide via replies that I have been privy to thus far..."

All I see now are quotes copypasted from the book of quotes sent out by robots and spam from MLM

...well, we enjoyed it while it lasted; is is the shape of things to come on internet?

Just bring it back Twitter! Allow us to view these other conversations.

This is the only way i know that someone is a real person, actually that is one of the better ways of finding good ppl to follow on twitter. Instead of all these loser accounts with 8000 followers and 3 tweets.

When i see a follower tweeting at someone at least i can tell hey this person is at least worth of a conversation.

This is much better method then the horrible / nasty #followfriday deal that happens every week. http://samerforzley.com/2009/03/05/twitter-followfriday-lets-make-a-deal/

I find the idea of not listening to 2% of their user base quite grand. Did they do the maths? That's not a tiny amount of people, is it? My guess is, that there are a lot of the early twitter adopters and evangelists in those 2% too.

Another bet of mine is that most of those 2% are most certainly not confused by the @ reply 'system'. It's inaccurate, not threaded and tracked - but who cares? It's 'the twitter way' and some learned to live comfortably with it.

I'm also willing to bet that a much higher percentage was living under the illusion that they were getting every single public tweet from the people they were following and didn't know that twitter was censoring and deciding what they could and could not see.

As to the topic of context, I personally find parts of the twitter blog post completely out of touch.

From the post:
"1) You should feel free to @reply people and not worry about it being out of context to some of your followers. In general, they won't see it." (http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/how-replies-work-on-twitter-and-how.html)

To me, twitter is not instant messaging or email. To me, one of the most important aspects about twitter is enabling discovery, stumbling upon new interesting people, sparking curiosity, reading different perspectives. Why take all that away? I'm flabbergasted. Speechless.

Would it hurt too much to just leave the [promiscuous] setting as default OFF, but there to turn ON for the users who are comfortable with it?

Are there economical incentives involving either business plans or prohibitive cost-benefit ratios precluding it? If so, twitter should be up front and transparent about it.

Please bring 'promiscuous' back. I don't want to have to subscribe to the RSS feed of every single user that I'm following in my reader of choice to get the complete unadulterated twitter stream (even from users that may have blocked me).

@blacktar

This is highly frustrating. I'd rather they do something about the crap DM spam I constantly get, and leave the chatter stream to individuals to see and filter as they want.

I used it that way for about a week after I joined twitter, added all the friends-of-friends that I was interested in, and then shut it off. Why? Because the stream was clogged with replies to people I didn't know and had no interest in. And it was frustrating as all get out to sift through them and decide what was worthy of seeing what they were replying to.

Plus, if you want to see who someone's talking to, can't you just view their personal stream? I'm still seeing plenty of @'s when I'm looking at specific people's pages.

On the other hand, since it was always an option, I don't know why they bothered taking the option away. I don't understand how people can stand to use twitter that way (unless they're only following maybe 10-20), but it also seems kind of silly to take away a setting like that.

Keep tabs on the backlash, via #fixreplies, over here: http://bit.ly/19ppZU

I really hope they reconsider this action.

What
can
we say!

Life goes on!

Prokofy, as usual, you are completely wrong. There is STILL nothing stopping your @'s showing up in searches done even by people who block you. So, if you do an @stevegilmor, he WILL see that, even if he's blocked you, if he's doing a vanity search. This does nothing to affect it.

Twitter is trying to solve a social interaction design problem for two polar types of use, but their current method completely ignores one side. Like many consumer social web services they don't have a strength in understanding human social interactions and the variances in them to make the best design decisions. Sadly, the people who really grasp this or are trying to grasp this social interaction design are still quite rare.

Twitter like nearly every other social web service needs to have advisors or social interaction designers on retainer for sanity checks. This move by Twitter needed a serious sanity check before it was launched.

Time to complain to Twitter!

However, I was able to see messages that included '@reply' as long as the message didn't start with it.

For example,

I was never able to see this: "@THE_REAL_SHAQ that's dope" if I was not following @THE_REAL_SHAQ in addition to the person who wrote this.

However,

I was always able to see this: "I just tagged @THE_REAL_SHAQ. Now where's my tickets?" because the message didn't START with @THE_REAL_SHAQ

Did something change?

Al

If anyone wants to find new followers, there are easy ways to do it. Just do the following things from time to time.

1. Check the public timeline for interesting tweets.
2. Check the following/follower lists of people you currently follow.
3. Go to the profile pages of the people you follow and you can see all their tweets to people you don't currently follow.

Yes, it would be nice to have the option to filter @replies as you see fit, but this move by twitter is not a shame, travesty, or in anyway detrimental to anyone. New people to converse with are still there, you simply have to look for them. Just like in real life.

Nice job pulling a 'Zuckerberg' Twitter. Well played.

Well done Twitter. You've just given us a great reason to take the conversation somewhere else.

@smange

I agree with the mass - W H Y ? This sucks and it should just be a users preference/settings option when it comes to DM's and these replies. Twitter should not get in the hype of what Facebook was starting to do. Twitter should ponder this a bit mroe and the path it wants to take.

Whatever happened to talking to people face to face?!

@thinkfastmvfstr | @jason_yu

Y'know, this is the 2nd time they've tried this - so I'm not buying their explanation posted on their blog.

I'm thinking this is in response to their 60% twitter-quitter attrition rate.

@hi It used to be optional to see @replies to people you didn't follow. All they did was take away the option of turning it on. (I always had it turned off too. It was annoying!)

@momentai Exactly!

However, as I said before, they might as well just add the option back. I don't care for it, but it was kind of pointless to take it away... not worth this amount of backlash, but whatever.

Poor me, I had to go out and discover Brown Sugar Cinnamon.

Cheers,

Mitch

The metric I'd love to see is how many of that 100k make up ACTIVE users ...

... and how much of the 98% make up the 60% of the twitter-quitters who sign up and never come back?

So not only does that solve the problem for anyone who wants their friends to be able to see the conversation fragment, it also REMOVES YOUR FOLLOWERS ABILITY TO FILTER OUT THIS DIALOG. So it's a win-win.

So THAAAATTTSS WHY Twitter did this.... it's just a great Facebook ad in disguise! Great marketing stump @MarkZuckerberg!! Absolutely brilliant. ;)

This is very considerate of you, to be glad that a feature is taken away from everybody, and from all the people who love it and work with it, that you personally didn't care for but chose to disable the very day it was introduced.

Wait—you could, like, disable it? I’m baffled. So there was, like, a choice? Jiminy! as @gruber would have it.

And apropos @ScottHepburn's tweet above, I’d rather put it like this:

#fixreplies Like meeting in a bar & not being allowed to listen to your friends conversing with _their_ friends they came with.
http://twitter.com/gyokusai/status/1785116237

Also, the problem with social networks is, they’re exactly as social as the companies behind them deign to allow. That’s one thing we shouldn’t forget.

^_^J.

Hoping they change it back.

James Hofheins http://twitter.com/jwhof
Operation Kindness
http://jameshofheins.blogspot.com

Who could ever think of this as a good idea?

Clearly this "2%" is not happy as #fixreplies is at the top of the trends and stories/articles like this are showing up outside of Twitter at a surprising rate.

I agree with the bar analogy from above and this article in that I feel like there are lots of people I won't meet now or share conversations with because of this change.

As one of those 2% that Michael referred to (and is that stat on Twitter's site somewhere?), I loved discovering a partial conversation, checking out the otherside, and often followed the other half as there was something there that made them interesting. Guess I'm the odd man out here, but if people want private conversations, DM them.

Serendipitous discovery is awesome and how does limiting that crazy-random-happenstance make things better for Twitter?

This self neutering of twitter will truly reduce it's propagation. But it does nothing for the actual overpopulation of the planet.

(Then again, now they won't have the OPTION) - but according to comment #27 above, less than 2% of all followers turned that option off anyway.

My guess is that I'll lose even LESS followers b/c of it.

R2 @anyone blah blah blah

Harris Fellman
http://twitter.com/harrisfellman

I'm a guy who follows just a small number of people, and I like seeing who they're replying to, so I had the option on. Now all of a sudden I'm blocked out of it, HAVING TO VISIT THEIR PERSONAL TWITTER PAGES, just to see everything they're talking about.

Removing the feature altogether is pretty short-sighted. Maybe make the option easier, like a checkbox. But give me the option to see all those replies without having to visit their profiles every damn time.

If 2% is the same as nothing to Twitter, then here's a suggestion to make Twitter 'simpler' - remove everybody from Twitter whose account name starts with the lowercase letter 'm'. It's just 2% of the total user accounts I'm afraid.

This takes what was fun about twitter. THe chance to meet other people by selecting the really important replys from the trolls.

Twitters starts to add the nails to it's own coffin.

:(

what an idiotic decision, really.

i'm one of those who mostly follows celebs because i came onto twitter in the last few weeks and do not know many people on it yet. i dont usually reply to them - sometimes i do, but what is the point of having it all one-sided? i may as well go to their official sites.

nah - twitter, this is the beginning of the end.

Strangely, the only positive thing I can see for Twitter to gain out of this is relief from the load of tweets. They already had the opt-out for users, so passing this move off as what users wanted is a lie. Are they under financial strains?

This new limitation is a certain cause for concern, not just frustration.

This decision essentially destroys an essential, unique feature of Twitter's site, making it now a simple-minded site that no longer hold anything for the creative, thoughtful, artful people who helped bring it to the position it once enjoyed.

Add to that the fact that not everyone uses their real names as their username and the argument for searching and following is invalid. Several people I know and now follow I found via a mutual friend replying to them.

I won't bother commenting on the "it's free, stop complaining" argument. It's that stupid.

I think this change is a part of going micro viral, "Trending Topics" are based on your online social behavior. A social-ecological target in twitter environments. Easy sale to media buyers, advertisers, agencies and a very lucrative contract from the government.

I agree 100%.

Super easy fix Not a broblem at all.

:-) @ you

Brad West ~ onomoney

Followers are disappearing, we can't see replies like we could......thanks for posting this! *races back to Twitter to see if anything else went nutsiola*

Derrdoo

While I understand not everybody wants to see that 'Suzie' is telling 'Sally' she's going to the mall... I was willing to deal with that because of the value of conversation coming from so many others. I, like so many others, am on twitter to network and meet new people.

In the meantime, (Twitter said they are working on a solution),a way around this is through http://twubs.com. It's basically a groups tool for twitter. On the positive side, I don't read about Suzie telling Sally she's going to the mall... but I do see conversation - tweeps - around subjects I'm interested in.

http://twubs.com/fixreplies is going crazy right now... as you can imagine.

This new change is a life-saver to me. I have two friends whom I WON'T add on Twitter because they do nothing but participate in @ reply conversations all day long. Like 70-120 tweets per person per day. I tried adding these pals once, and immediately unfollowed them because suddenly my Twitter stream was full of nonsense sent to celebrities and personal conversations with people I don't know.

I don't have time to comb through that mountain of crap to find the gold from the people who send maybe 5-10 great Tweets a day. But it also sucks to not add your friends.

I can understand your perspective -- but the opportunity was completely taken away from those who wanted it.

That's the aspect I have difficulty with.

Here is Twitter's PR approach to jumping said shark:
http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/whoa-feedback.html

Gee, ya think? In order to have either of the other TWO options (all or none) turned on, that means you have to be proactive about it which means you are probably a generally more active twitterererer. The claim is that they have 6,000,000 accounts. 2% of that is 120,000 people who are active twitterererers.

Over the past 24 hours 120,000 people have found out that they do not count in the eyes of Twitter. I suspect that "getting a ton" is an understatement.

And, to echo others. I would LOVE to see a usage breakdown of the 98% vs the 2%. Mostly when people create an acocunt and then quit, they don't delete 'em. How many of that 98% are dormant or occasional accounts vs the 2% ?

They also just shut off the reason I stopped using Twitter. Maybe most of you found the "@[someone you don't follow]: [some comment with zero context]" tweets to be friend-making awesomesauce.

For me, they were unbearably annoying page clutter, and were the reason I gave Twitter the finger and walked away. So, for anyone who can't possibly understand why they would do this, people like me are your answer.

I don't understand, though: can you adjust the settings to show this stuff? If so, great, everyone can be happy and this is a non-issue. If not...why wouldn't they offer this as a settings choice?

I like to follow as many people that are interested in a certain topic as I can. I used a site called twitseek to find people interested in that topic, and then followed everyone who was found.

Twitseek then did that annoying promotional think where it says you used their services to find someone. If the old style of seeing replies to followers was in place, my profile page would be flooded with these messages.

HOWEVER, I do agree that the change is a step backwards in social connection. It isn't clear to me at the moment why this change was made, but I get the feeling there is a strong reason behind it that was based on user experience, not money.

Perhaps their plan is to sell and cash out before the Twitter joins the Dodo.

I would like to apologize for my remark yesterday. I could still see the @ replies that Twitter was filtering, so I thought this was someone overreacting to something and trying to start a rumor. Twitter has confirmed the issue on their blog, and I feel really bad for accusing the author of this article of starting a rumor. I should have better informed myself before making such a wrong statement. My apologies to Marshall and everyone at ReadWriteWeb. Clearly I live under a rock. (:

http://gsfn.us/t/6g7y

Thanks, and...

Be Well!
ECS Dave

Update your Twitter randomly according to your intrest Or, from Rss Feed Or, from your own tweet message list Or, Any combination of the above three http://feedmytwitter.com

Good idea in that case, but for us less popular folk, not so good haha.