kosertech

Twitter has has the option to view @replies to only the people you follow or all @replies in the settings for quite some time.  Last night unexpectedly they changed this to only allow you to see @replies to those people you follow.  This change effects the API (all client applications) as well as the web.  There is no longer a way to see replies to folks your not following unless you directly visit each users profile page.

I think that this is a change for the worse and there are others that would agree with me.

The reason I dislike it so much is I used it extensively when I first joined twitter in 2007 to help me find other interesting people to follow.  Twitter states the change is to reduce confusion.  Huh, normally when I want to reduce confusion I write some more documentation and try to educate users instead of removing a useful feature.  Perhaps it was removed to reduce load on the cache from having to load up timelines with tons of @replies that weren’t normally associated with a persons followers list but I see it as an important change that impacts how some people were using twitter.

Twitter claims that less than 5% of the users were using the feature but lets say hypothetically that twitter has only 2 million users I’m sure they probably have more in reality but this unexpected change impacts 100,000 people of that hypothetical 2 million number.  Doesn’t seem like such a small population to me.  If it was confusing maybe they should have altered the default or done a sweep to turn it off for everyone but leave the option to turn it back on.  As it is right now it’s a fundamental change in the way the timeline works for quite a number of people and impacts how someone might find new friends via twitter.  I hope they will reconsider and enable this but I fear it’s a done deal at this point and won’t be coming back.

You will still see mentions inline in a tweet that isn’t a reply but the way I’m interpreting the functionality is anytime you specifically reply to someone that someone else isn’t following they won’t see the reply.

If I compose a new tweet though “Having lunch with my brosef @funkatron” then that will be visible to all users of my time line since it wasn’t a reply.  But if @funkatron replies to that message and says “@vkoser we’ll talk about that new library your writing can’t wait to see it”  None of @funatrons followers that don’t already follow me would see his reply even if they were interested in finding out more information about whatever cool new library I’m writing.

I’m with @funkatron, I don’t like it one little bit.  Here is a link to the original blog post from twitter.