While many of you peacefully slept the night away last night, Twitter was busy shaking things up and causing a stir of controversy. Twitter is known to randomly make changes to how the service functions taking away user-configured options and instead just dictating how things operate. This happened last night and caused a backlash that I don’t think they ever considered.
Twitter made the decision yesterday to remove any posts from your main timeline if they started with an @username that you weren’t personally following. Their reasoning was that this removed some of the one-sided conversations that you may not directly be following and this would help clean up your Twitter experience. Great for Twitter to think this, but they are absolutely wrong in my opinion. Seeing @ replies from people I follow to people I don’t follow was basically another Twitter search option or “tweet-stalking” if you will. Through seeing these I was introduced to many of the people that I follow and found many other contacts/friends that I wouldn’t have thought were on Twitter. By disabling this feature, Twitter basically took that away. Not only did they take this away, but many other services such as FriendFeed were directly impacted by how messages are shared between the services and what people could/couldn’t see.
As soon as the change was announced Twitter was lit up with #fixreplies from many disgruntled users and FriendFeed came to life with users trying to test out the change and see what and how things were impacted. All of this happened because, in my opinion, Twitter made a few big mistakes with this change.
1) They took away a once user-configurable option and forced their plans on users.
2) The explanation of the change was covered in about two sentences that did little to explain what the change really meant.
3) They promised that “new features” would be coming to make the following/tweet-stalking of others better in the future, but didn’t have these changes ready when they decided to disable functionality.
4) They apparently collected little to nothing in terms of user opinion about this change based on the chaos that started after they implemented the change.
So what happened once the change was rolled out? Well #fixreplies quickly became the top “trend” on Twitter and as I described previously users set out to try and determine what the impacts really were. A couple hours after the change was announced Evan Williams made a post that based on feedback they were considering options for the @ replies. Nice to see that Twitter used the real-time feedback their service provides, but unfortunate that they did it a little too late and upset a large number of their users. As I write this, I’m not sure what the next steps will be for the @ replies, but I’m sure it will be interesting.
What do you think? Did you notice the change? Does the change impact how you use Twitter? Do you think that Twitter should have tried to collect the feedback first or do they have a right to “innovate” and adjust as necessary based on feedback?
Tags: #fixreplies, controversy, twitter
