#fixreplies “Drove my Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry…”
Marshall says it best, “Goodbye People I Never Knew” <tear>
The hustle and bustle of Twitter slowed to the level of a party gone flat…no bubbly. At first people just thought everyone decided to take a nap, all at the same time. Then there was a mass uprising…but no one can see it, because you can no longer see the @replies of people you don’t follow.
Last week, Twitter added a great new feature called Trending Topics. Little did they know that the #1 Trending Topic would be turned AGAINST them and their recent decision to quiet down the party.
#1 Trending Topic is #fixreplies and here are what some of the people are saying, as they are charging up to the castle to put the stake in Dr. Twitterstein’s heart.
“Oh gee that’s right @ev & @biz don’t follow most people, so they won’t see THAT WE’RE FREAKIN’ PISSED…#fixreplies”
Checking @ev the CEO of Twitter, it would appear that they didn’t notice until #fixreplies hit #1 on the Trending Topics list, as all @ev had so say during all this was “Lunching w/@BertDecker at Yank Sing. It’s been a deem sum week.”
Talk about clueless. Did they think people woudn’t notice that someone turned off the light switch?
Seattle’s own @Shih_Wei says: “Dear @ev, the only alternative is to put the options back in users’ hands. Newcomers will figure it out, too. #fixreplies”
Some hearfelt pleas: “Twitter is now hiding messages from people you follow, if it’s a reply to someone you don’t follow. How am I supposed to discover people now? #fixreplies “
Lots and lots of complaints, like this one: “Looks like Twitter will kill itself w/ stupid un-social changes like #fixreplies “
Given the comment above, maybe the post should have said The Day Twitter Committed Suicide.
Some of the Coders who write Twitter Apps, like Seattle’s @dacort see it as an opportunity: “dacort Twitter taketh away, and small angry developers will provideth. http://ff.im/2Qd4Z“
I’m going to go to sleep and hope I will wake up to find it was all just a bad dream.
I noticed that changed too, that was always how I found my friends of friends. People that I didnt even know were on Twitter would reply to someone I know, or me, and I would be able to see them. I really hope the community gets their way and this feature returns.
“Twitter is now hiding messages from people you follow, if it’s a reply to someone you don’t follow. How am I supposed to discover people now?”
I don’t get it. That part is the way it has worked ever since I signed up. The only messages I’ve ever seen from you on my twitter.com/home page or in desktop clients are ones you post that aren’t replies to anyone or ones that are replies to people I’m also following.
The other part (not showing replies to you if you don’t follow the person who posted them) is new, but I don’t see what the big deal is. Most of the time someone “replies” to me that I’m not following, it’s basically TwitterSpam.
Hi Tim,
That tweet is from someone at #fixreplies. I’ll add quotes in the post to the parts that are not me talking to clarify.
The removal of this feature affects:
1) Very quiet people who like to watch other people talking to people they know. This is much like the thousands of people who read blogs and like to watch the comments, but never comment themselves.
2) People being referred to as “promiscuous” tweeters. People who follow one person, but find more interesting people talking about the same things in that person’s tweet stream. These are the people complaining the loudest.
For someone using Twitter like email, and only talking to people they already know, there may be no effect.
It would appear from today’s response by Twitter executives, that they needed to do this, or have so much volume that they might crash altogether. Had they been honest about that from the beginning, and asked for patience and understanding of their “problem”, the response would not have been turned against them.
By trying to spin a problem into a positive, they invoked the wrath of the masses. A good lesson in “honesty is the best policy”.
Hi Tim,
That tweet is from someone at #fixreplies. I’ll add quotes in the post to the parts that are not me talking to clarify.
The removal of this feature affects:
1) Very quiet people who like to watch other people talking to people they know. This is much like the thousands of people who read blogs and like to watch the comments, but never comment themselves.
2) People being referred to as “promiscuous” tweeters. People who follow one person, but find more interesting people talking about the same things in that person’s tweet stream. These are the people complaining the loudest.
For someone using Twitter like email, and only talking to people they already know, there may be no effect.
It would appear from today’s response by Twitter executives, that they needed to do this, or have so much volume that they might crash altogether. Had they been honest about that from the beginning, and asked for patience and understanding of their “problem”, the response would not have been turned against them.
By trying to spin a problem into a positive, they invoked the wrath of the masses. A good lesson in “honesty is the best policy”.
Portland Real Estate,
Most people are circumventing the change by putting the handle, @ARDELLd at the end vs the beginning of the tweet.
For now, the change only affects tweets with @ as the first character of the post. Some say it is the spam bots causing the problem, but it won’t take long for the spam bots to figure out that they need to put the @ sandwiched inside the text. It may slow them down, but it won’t stop them.
#fixreplies for those who may be wondering, is called a hashtag. When a group wants to keep track of everything said on a certain topic, they adopt a term and put a # in front of it. Then anyone can search all the tweets/comments on that topic using the “hashtag”.
As example #celtics during the Celtics games.
#midyear is going around now, so people can follow the goings on at NAR’s Midyear Conference in Washington, DC
#idol appears a lot during the time American Idol is on TV so that people can share their opinions on who should win or who should be ousted at the end of the show.
The Top 10 Trending Topics show in the sidebar on everyone’s Twitterpage. The number one Trending Topic usually floats down and out pretty quickly, but #fixreplies is staying at number one…so far.
Just went to visit Twitter:
Twitter is currently down for maintenance.
We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.
Rhonda,
Maybe I should rename the post “The Day Twitter “passed out” instead of passed on” 🙂
They actually had an advisory last night saying they were going to be down for an hour today at noon Pacific Standard Time for scheduled mainenance.
A formal response post From Twitter execs just went up from @biz
http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html
I’m not sure I know what this means:
“The problem with the setting was that it didn’t scale and even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt.”
Funniest corporate-speak I’ve seen in a while. Looks like it was brewed in the cauldrons of some 500-year-old company’s PR department, not at a startup heralded as a communications visionary.
Tim,
It’s a shame when young guys like that think they have to spin it, when the whole concept of social media is transparency. I was glad to see that Pete Cushmore agreed with me in his post on mashable. If they had just been honest about it from the get go, they likely would have garnered everyone’s support. But tweeting about lunch while everyone was scratching their heads at the change, was not a good way to handle it.
Someone else’s suggestion was good as well, that they unveil some new spiffy feature, while they quietly remove another 🙂
I’ll have to go to Twitter now and see if @dacort deciphered the code of “scale” and “blunt”. Scale I pretty much get…kind of like saying “we bit off more than we could chew” 🙂
This is hysterical! Someone already set up a website at fixreplies.com that shows a continuously updated stream (you don’t have to hit the refresh button) of everyone commenting on the “problem” using the hashtag.
http://fixreplies.com/
whoah – I have been laying off of it because I have been so busy, but I will have to watch this closely – it doesn’t make a lot fo sense to me. You are such a techie, BTW:)