Twitter users are very much disgruntled with the latest changes. Who would have thought that something as simple as making replies private could cause such uproar? If you are a Twitter user though you’ll understand the value of being able to see everyone else’s replies.
So what’s the big hoopla all about? Twitter decided to remove the option of being able to view @replies of people you don’t follow to people you are following. The decision was made because as Twitter put it “receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable” so they went ahead and removed the “undesirable and confusing option.” Their mistake though is that the option is actually really confusing only to newbie’s, which due to the surge in new users can now be considered the mainstream users. It is NOT confusing and definitely NOT undesirable to its older loyal users, hence the uproar. Twitter users like it because it’s very useful for multiple conversations and discovering and following new accounts.
Twitter won’t be Twitter though if they don’t get the real time message so it isn’t surprising that Ev Williams, Twitter’s founder and CEO, tweeted his response. Evan William’s tweet reads, “Reading people’s thoughts on the replies issue. We’re considering the alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.” Pretty sure they will come up with a good compromise soon, unless they just decide to bring it back. However, we can also be sure it won’t be back till their engineers fix the technical problems, which according to the Twitter blog has something to do with scalability.
UPDATE: Right after posting this Twitter posted an update on what they plan to do about the replies issue. Their battle plan includes changes in ability to view updates beginning with @username and improvement in settings control of each user regarding what they can see for accounts being followed.
