Twitter: don’t worry, not even its inventors understand it
Twitter changed one of its settings this week. It was a tiny change, some might not have even noticed it, but for dedicated users of the microblogging platform it was a huge change to the way Twitter works, what it does, and how they use it.
It also had the astounding side effect of proving not even Twitter’s inventors fully understand how to squeeze the best from their brainchild.
The change was a simple one. Twitter stopped showing users replies from their friends if they were directly aimed at someone they didn’t also know. The idea was to stop you seeing “one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow.”
Seems simple enough. An innocent attempt to clean up feeds all over the world (and probably ease the load on Twitter’s servers too). But it sent a flurry of indignation through the Twitterverse. See, those little “fragments” were relied on by many to make new friends. The might not have been intended for a wider audience, but that doesn’t mean they’re not interesting, and nosy Twitter users mooching through them found they’d quickly track down others discussing interesting things. They’d then follow them, and widen their net of daily tweets. Simple, really, but it’s something the boffins at Twitter should have forseen.
In fairness to the Twitter team, they’ve responded with the speed and succinct clarity you’d expect from microblogging mavens, bringing back public updates beginning with an @username to restore the service’s “serendipity and discovery.” They’re also working on a more advanced setting which can be tweaked on a per-follower basis.
However, I fear that’s getting a bit granular. The whole point of Twitter is its blanket approach to broadcasting news, thoughts, feelings or straight-forward rants. The Twitter team’s changes, and eagerness in backing down, serve simply to underline one of the continuing peculiarities of microblogging: nobody really understands it in full. Except maybe the hive-mind of its users. And one thing’s for sure: they don’t like change!
P.s. For one of the most jaw-dropping uses of Twitter yet, have a peep at the updates of @Astro_Mike, the first man to twitter from space.
Tags: microblogging, twitter
May 13th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
[...] Lots of other Twitter users were as dumbstruck as I was. They tweeted up a storm of protest, and Biz responded with a blog post this morning acknowledging their ire (and suddenly saying that Twitter made the change in part for technical reasons, a factor he didn’t mention in the first post). And in a follow-up post this afternoon, he reiterated that technical issues forced the change, and that seeing @replies to people you weren’t following was confusing. But he did say that the company is working on building better sharing options, nd he did throw a short-term bone to unhappy users: …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. [...]
May 14th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
[...] Twitter: don
May 14th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
It’s a shame they saw something so valuable as a “one-sided conversation.” They should think of it this way. Suppose I’m following @BarackObama and he was actually active & using this account. I’d want to see all of the messages he was sending out, not just messages to people I also follow. If I want to see what he was replying to, I can click on the receiver’s name and see their Tweets.
The point is not that the conversation’s were one-sided, it’s that I want to see everything that @BarackObama tweets, no matter who it’s addressed to. I can already do that on the web interface by looking at their profile page but by choosing all @replies, it meant that they came directly to me in my Tweetstream. Now, I have to go out and search for them.
Also, I follow some people who mainly write @replies instead of original Tweets. This change means that I see only a fraction of their Tweets since it is unlikely we are both following the same group of people. So it’s almost like I’m not following them at all.
It’s clear that the folks at Twitter use the the network in a very different way than some of their core users.