Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Twitter Screws the Pooch

Twitter today with no notice made the optional mandatory.

For one refresh cycle of my Twitter web home page there was a one line notice that a change had been made to settings. It included a link to the Twitter blog for details, but there was no post yet.


The "Notices" tab under "Settings" no longer lets you configure how you get @replies aimed at people that you don't follow. Twitter unilaterally decided that us seeing @replies to someone we don't follow is a Bad Thing.

Probably half the people I follow I discovered because someone I already followed said something to someone I wasn't following yet. I wondered "What made them say THAT?" and took a peek. I'd be missing a lot of good Twitter friends right now if this had been the only option up till now.

Sure it can be confusing and undesirable to see half of a conversation while on mobile. There used to be a simple cure for that. Even if you forgot to change the setting before going mobile you could change it via the web browser on your mobile. For that matter, it was right there on the settings if you didn't want half conversations on the web or in your desktop client.

The Powers That Be at Twitter apparently believe that there is only one correct way to use Twitter. I disagree, I believe that there are almost as many ways to use Twitter as there are people actively using Twitter.  A few celebrities who can't be bothered to get an assistant to change the settings for them shouldn't lead Twitter to rob the rest of us of options that we value.

UPDATE: Some people are working around the issue by putting text in front of the name of the person they are replying to. While this works, it forces everyone following you to see all of your @replies whether they want to or not. Thus, by removing the choice Twitter has potentially made the situation worse.

UPDATE 2: If you visit the original post on the Twitter Blog, you'll see that over 75 blogs in multiple languages have responded to the change..

UPDATE 3: Biz Stone, one of Twitter's founders, has made a new post on the Twitter Blog responding to the objections. It's short enough that I'm going to just include 95% of it below:


We're getting a ton of extremely useful feedback about yesterday's update to Settings. The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever. Nevertheless, it's amazing to wake up and see all the tweets about this change.

We're hearing your feedback and reading through it all. One of the strongest signals is that folks were using this setting to discover and follow new and interesting accounts—this is something we absolutely want to support. Our product, design, user experience, and technical teams have started brainstorming a way to surface a new, scalable way to address this need.
Having been on the wrong end of scaling problems a couple of times in the past I understand that sometimes you have to take a step backwards before you can move forward. I hope Twitter will make this a priority.