‘What are you doing’ needs an @ reply ? :)

And every so often, we hear about how brands screw up on Facebook and Twitter, these days we even regularly hear how Facebook screws up on itself, and finally we heard about how Twitter ‘screwed up’ on Twitter. In case you missed it, the chronology can be read here.

And in case you were too lazy to follow the link, Twitter suddenly yanked off an @replies option — a non-default setting to monitor a conversation between someone you follow and someone you don’t, which was only used by 3% of the Twitter universe. In an initial blog post Twitter addressed it from a product design perspective and as a ‘small settings change’. The response from users was whale disproportionate to the 3%, resulting in the trending of #fixreplies . Poor Twitter was actually doing just that, because the 3% users were straining the servers, since each time someone sent an @reply, Twitter had to scan people’s settings to figure out which tweet could appear in whose timeline. The fun part is that we anyway got to hear only half the conversation.

Let me try to explain quickly A and B follow each other, B follows C, A does not. In the earlier system (where A was one of the 3% who had changed the default option to ‘see all @ replies’) A could see B’s @replies to C. With this change that Twitter made, A stopped seeing it. The ‘fun part’ I mentioned earlier was that A anyway couldn’t see C’s updates, or specifically C’s @replies to B. Anyway, the 3% considered this option as an aid to ‘serendipitous discovery‘ of new people. But I think the trending happened simply because Twitter didn’t tell anyone before they made the change. As one of the 3% (I think, since I clearly remember finding people based on the @replies of those i follow. Shefaly, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we started following each other thanks to our individual conversations with @dina) I think its a  mistake if the Twitter blog was updated without studying all the aspects, a bigger mistake if Twitter chose not to tell users the real reason.

Twitter then blogged once more emphasising that the technical aspects, more than the product design flaws, were the chief reason for removing this option. And later, gave a consolation gift which now means that A could now see those updates of B, which does not begin with @C. eg.  wondering what @C is smoking. To me, that solves the problem, because its just a format change in a way. And who knows, maybe users will take more initiative in helping connect people now – a human touch to serendipity. Or more power to ‘recommended users’. Meanwhile, there are at least five of us who can have the pun fests we enjoy, because (only) we all follow a particular id we created only for this. So I’m sure users will figure their lives out without the option. 🙂

Like Twitter, I too learned a few lessons from this entire exercise. That it is important to be transparent and communicate your complete perspectives, especially if you exist largely because of the community’s efforts. There might be disagreements, but its better to make your stand and reasons clear before the event. That it’s very easy for users to lose the perspective that Twitter is a free service that was never meant to be scaled so much, and a lot of what they’re doing now could be to ensure they can scale up. I’m quite glad that even unbridled mobs have  limits of ‘justice’ they can get. That it’s still an ecosystem about which very few (if any) people have a  clear long term objective about – on one side we complain about noise, and when Twitter removes an option that in many ways added to the noise, we complain about that too. That hashtags are increasingly becoming an end to themselves than a means. That it’s the real time issues that matter – most users wouldn’t know that its quite a difficult task (if not impossible) to get their first tweet, after they cross tweet # 3200.  Another example of how Twitter is so many different things to different people.

until next time, “And I will cut you off from the peoples..”