Twitter Changes Replies Then Reconsiders

I’ve been on Twitter since February of 2007 and it has become a great tool for me to meet new people all over the world. One of the ways that I do that is by looking at who other people ‘follow’ and at @reply conversations that are occurring on Twitter. Recently Twitter instituted a change that will make that more difficult or at least less effective.

The initial statement on the Twitter blog explaining the change was:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

Here is an excerpt from Techcrunch that does a little bit better explanation of the change:

The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with.

But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it.

This caused quite a backlash on Twitter and lead to some eventual backpedaling by @biz and the Twitter team.

So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

Now at this point I was thinking that it was awfully dumb for Twitter to remove this feature and cause such a big ruckus so I dug a little deeper. I was wondering if there was a solid engineering reason as to why they made the change.  After a few Google searches I came across this very good explanation at Dare Obasajo’s blog. The important thing here is the update at the bottom of the post.

Without making this too technical it seems that the @reply feature as it was implemented was simply not going to scale well. With users like @aplusk, @TheEllenShow, or @oprah the amount of overhead on the system when they reply to someone is huge. This alone would not be a problem but when you aggregate with all the other users with 2k, 5k, or 10k followers it could bog the system down until it becomes unmanageable.

My personal opinion is that I liked the feature and was one of the 3% of users who actually used it. I think they should find a more scalable way to make the feature work and bring it back.

What do you think? Were you even aware the feature existed until it was removed? If so, did you use it? Leave your comments below and tell me what you think.

Christopher Johnston (@chrisjohnston) is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.

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