With the current acknowledgement of the Follow|Unfollow approach ppl have to their accounts - some days you feel like following, then the converso rounds a bend and you unfollow, but then may came back again to where you want to follow - how*ARE* they coming up with this magic 3% that Ev and Biz's world suddenly revolves around?

Let's see the the derivations that=3% guys. Otherwise, it's just more number juggling. How convenient

However the different semantics of clicking and typing @ replies is not new. Threading was only working if you actually refered to the message you reply (or if your api client sent the reference).

Gruss
Bernd

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.

That said, I can understand the objective here. For longtime or advanced Twitter users, these attempts may seem insane and without reason. To see the objective, I think we need to take a few steps back and look at the big picture. Twitter has been growing rapidly, and is moving into the mainstream. Soon -- if not already -- the vast majority of Twitter users will no longer be tech-savvy, early-adopter types. Twitter needs these users and must cater to them, and try to provide the best experience possible. To many of these users, seeing one side of a conversation ("@john I fully agree with you on that one") doesn't make for a good experience, especially when the stream fills up with many of these one-sided conversations. Its kind of like walking through a room of people have conversations on their mobile phones -- while some of the "fragments" may interest you, a lot of it is just noise. And when the noise level gets to be too much, you just want to leave the room (or plug your ears). Twitter's goal here, I think, is to try to filter out the noise and present a stream of (mostly) broadcast messages that may be meaningful without understanding the missing context.

Of course, the other issue is discovery, but that's not immediately obvious to Twitter newbies. The challenge is to try to balance noise filtering without killing the discovery potential, and that's a touch challenge. The latest "reply button" change is an attempt at finding that balance. The notion is that with the reply button, Twitter knows with certainty that an update is a specific reply to another message, and thus potentially a one-sided fragment -- there is a good chance that this may be noise to most of a users followers, and may not add value to their streams. The tough part is that sometimes it isn't noise, but a great opportunity to discover new people, topics, etc. -- which is what makes Twitter so great.

Once I was sent an @reply that amounted to a support request for one of the plugins I developed, the person was getting a specific error message and didn't know how to fix it. I sent an @reply (using reply button) explaining that he/she needed to install some missing modules. But as I sent the reply, I realized that my reply wouldn't really be valuable to any my followers -- even if they used my plugins too, the lack of context in my reply was such that it wouldn't help them (with 140 characters, there is often little room to provide context). The reply was received and the problem was solved -- but in this case my reply may have been unnecessarily broadcast. A day later, another person sent a tweet with the same problem -- I sent the same @reply, problem solved. But can you imagine if 100 people had this issue (or other specific questions), my Twitter stream would look like a bunch context-less, duplicated updates that were really intended for just one person -- who would want to follow me with a stream like that? In this example, it would be preferable if when I used the reply button, that my reply not show up for all my followers but only for the replied-to user -- and that is exactly what Twitter has done with the recent change. So I can appreciate the goal here. But the problem is that not all reply-button replies are created equal, many of them do represent value to my followers. As such, the latest policy isn't sufficient.

Finally, the other issue is "default versus optional settings". With a userbase that is becoming more and more mainstream, I can understand a desire to have defaults that try to filter out some of the noise, etc. But why remove the non-default option to see all @replies? Now this doesn't make sense, and the reason may be a performance/scalabilty one, as other commenters have suggested. What is clear is that filtering options are needed to support a large user base with varying uses for Twitter.

"Will a follower discover the change ...? Will the Tweeter discover a reply change? Will the follower care?"
"These questions - and many others - will be answered in the next episode of Soap."

Will be interesting to see where they go with this.

What is not thought out in this policy is that if I want a message to be seen only by one user, I send via direct message. What they should have done was allow direct messages to someone who is not following you. Then it becomes the senders choice as to whether followers can read the message or not.

Clearly the gurus at Twitter have 2 problems. One must be too much traffic slowing their servers faster than they can build their own server farm, and the second is they don't understand what the users vision is of their service. They only understand their own version. That can spell doom for Twitter.

Talk about Billion Dollar Blunders. Is it me or is twitter getting the ignore your audience test changes award?

http://twitter.com/mchiaviello

However I really don't like this being in the other's hands... I want to be the one to decide the @replies I see. There's a lot of people I'd have to unfollow if I had to start sorting through their 150@replies every day.

All in all, this was not well handled.

When Ev queried the community a year ago, the feedback was exactly the same -- don't do it. I understand it must be a scalability issue, but this is not the fix. Addressing scalability is the fix!

Even old school early adopters often don't understand how replies work, so I understand their frustration. Here's hoping they can figure out a simple way to explain it and bring back the option for those of us who like the noise.

Also, that 3% figure is totally bogus since (as you mentioned in the post) they've totally architected the system away from the option. The default on new accounts has been, for some time, to only see chatter between people you're following. I hate that they're saying "97% of our users won't notice a thing" -- they've stacked the deck.

Glad to see that Twitter is being mindful of its users.

Thanks for the post!

t ~pooptheworld.com

I hope the Twitter VIPs will actually read today's blogs, comments & Tweets about this issue. But I fear they won't bother.

And which is it, Twitter? You can't scale or you just want to make things simpler? I don't know about you, but I'm losing trust either way just because they're contradicting themselves.

Everyone please sign my #fixreplies petition here and RT to send a strong, unified message:
http://bit.ly/fixtwitter

Ridiculous.

@pdxwatch

If it's an @reply that really wouldn't be of interest outside of a circle of friends (I dunno what off the top of my head, but they must exist) then I use the Reply button and only followeres following followers can see it?

And if I start a new tweet with an @name, then it goes out as a public tweet and everyone who follows me sees it?

Actually before August 12th (and probably for some time after) all clients did that. We and other client developers went out of our way to implement in_reply_to_status_id:

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/f009c76d17199084?pli=1

Where's the fail whale when it's needed?

Separately, you really want to do the settings person by person? Try using it even for SMS messages on @replies. Once you get into the 100's even finding and managing becomes a problem. I can't imagine trying to set it up to work one by one.

One element that would help discovery is to get feedback on conversations that friends are participating in. Eg #fixreplies Right now where those are @replies you would no longer see them. For the most part those #hashtags are more interesting to me than the #twittersearch one.

Lastly, having created Phweet http://phweet.com where part of the execution was the power of voice conversations that could propagate through the network and rapidly escalate to conference calls... Who's talking to who goes out the window based on the way Twitter is developing their strategy. To my knowledge they never talked to developers.

it's nothing of the kind.

If you don't follow someone, you won't see their @ to other people, which removes the serendipity.

If you are follow blocked, you can't see their tweets in your stream, but it also looks as if you will not be able to see their @ now in searching their name in search, which is the workaround.

That's deliberate.

There's now a serious hobble put in the search that you aren't noticing or writing about.

Before, if I wasn't following a person, but searched a key word and found them saying something interesting about a topic I was interested in, or in reply to someone else interesting, I could press on the arrow button and instantly reply to them.

Now I can't.

To reply to them, I have to press on the entire tweet, then get the arrow button *again*, then reply.

If they have follow-blocked me, I can't do that because I will get the message about locked tweets even if they are not locked in fact to the general public.

So I can manually type their name and still talk back to them -- a key function of social media simply MUST be the ability to talk back! -- but I'm not certain whether my @ goes into their reply tab or is visible any more because they aren't following me, and have follow-blocked me.

And that's what the thin-skinned A-listers who make liberal use of follow-black wanted - the ability to get followers and broadcast to those loyal followers, but prevent people they don't like from ever talking back to them by erasing what they say.

That's a terrible thing when replicated across an entire system that has come to be the chief form of democratic discourse in our society these days.

@CarriBugbee

When you click reply it sets a in_reply_to_status_id field and many clients do this and we do this in friendbinder (http://friendbinder.com). It wasn't available in the early days of twitter and it has been around since August 12th 2008 (http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/f009c76d17199084?pli=1). It seems that most replies that you would normally see will have this set.

Only a small number of extra messages that to someone but not a reply will now be shown that weren't before.

"There's no mention that all but a small number of people have in recent months failed to opt-out of the relatively recent default of not seeing replies to strangers. "

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_reverses_policy_change_for_now_this_is_nut.php

Before I send @MarshallK a tweet, I need to think hard whether I want people who don't follow @MarshallK yet to read my message to him or not. If I don't want them to see the reply, I click on the reply button. I retain the message threading that way because I'm creating an explicit relationship between two Twitter messages, but I sacrifice @MarshallK's desire to be discovered by my followers who don't follow him yet.

If I DO want people to be able to see a tweet sent to you, no-matter whether they're following you or not, I'd better just manually type @MarshallK as the first word in my Twitter text input box. That way I do distort the automatic message threading that would have been established because of the in_reply_to_status_id and in_reply_to fields that don't get populated using this method.

Phew.

And, B) I use itweet.net/web exactly BECAUSE it includes a really useful threading function where you can click on "in reply to" and the first tweet opens right below the tweet of the person I'm following (not in a new window, as with Twitter's interface - which I *hate*) - and in fact you can keep clicking "in reply to" for the whole thread. So that's disabled with the new function.

Sigh.

So the long and short is if the in_reply_to is properly set (via reply button, for instance) then the rule will come into play.

Another thing that's not clear here: will the replies I'm not allowed to see include those created via a reply button in a third-party client? That is, anything that shows "in reply to" in Tweetdeck, is gone now, unless I'm already following both parties?

So it's not fixed.

I have no objection to folks choosing to not see what they don't want to see. I want the same freedom of choice, that's all.

Wonder why they didn't say that in the first place? :-) Is it better to have a slew of stories about Twitter not listening to users than a similar storm about Twitter not being ready for prime time?

--Michael @miketrose

Let's not forget that in terms of Twitter, 3% equals at least 150,000 individual users.

Moreover, I'd like to know how many of that 97% make up the 60% of one-time 'Twitter quitters' who set up accounts and then quickly lose interest ...

... as it could me 3% is a larger % of the active users affected by said scalability issue (first reported as a UX complaint).

Now you're saying that as of today *everyone* following @A, but not necessarily @B, will see that message? I can't imagine Twitter reversing themselves to such an extreme, to now focus a setting used by a minority of users, which they tried to remove last night, onto ALL users. Just doesn't make sense.

I consider myself an "early adopter" of Twitter and I prefer to only see my friends' messages to other people I'm friends with. I also like to know that when I send something beginning with "@" it's not going to EVERYONE whose following me, just my friends who are also interested in "@B".

======================
michel123
====================
adult- adult

I loved it when Twitter was about simplicity. This I don't love.

Way to go. I'm already throwing up. It supports people now that don't get basic replying.

It will be interesting to see if there's more hell to pay from the 97% who didn't know people they were following were that conversational. I hope that most replies are generated with the reply button (or equivalent, on third-party clients), rather than explicitly typing the username.

I'm looking forward to more controls later, definitely.

You don't betray the user's trust by first citing them as the reason for feature removal ... when the truth was that it was always a scalability issue.

http://is.gd/zApz

I have a feeling that the past 24 hour "@ scandal" will become a chapter in future business school MBA course work.

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