Quick hit: Twitter Reply Controversy

(This is going to be quick post about twitter. As such, we are going to be using some twitter terms loosely, and won't be going into definitions. We don't like saying this, but if you don't use twitter you probably won't understand this. But there is funny stuff going on at http://www.gvalentinoisrandom.com as well as here!)

This week twitter was hit with its first really big time crisis when the behavior of @ replies was changed. It used to be that you could do the following:

1. See @ replies from people you follow to other people you follow (which was our choice)
2. See all the @ replies of people you follow, regardless of you following the person that the @ reply was sent to

A change was made, ostensibly for system reasons, so that all @ replies worked as described in point #1. This angered a lot of people who used setting #2, who used this to find new people on twitter. There was a huge outcry.

A workaround was proposed: simply put a character in front of your @, or make sure that the @ is not the first part of your tweet.

In addition to this, people also complained that this was going to ruin #followfriday, a twitter tradition of sharing and recommending the people you follow (ed note: #followfriday is already broken because of how people abuse it, but that's for another time). They said #followfriday wouldn't work if they started their tweet with an @. This is bogus. Either use the workaround or put the #followfriday tag at the start of your tweet. No, some of them say, we don't do it that way.

We're going to sound very mean about this, but we only want to say it once, and we want you to clip 'n' save this and look at it sometime in the future.

We used the @ reply option where we only saw @s that involved people we follow. We understood your reaction to the change breaking your experience.

Your solution, however, breaks OUR experience, because the noise has jumped WAY up on the signal-to-noise ratio.

We, however, understand and are not complaining. We are going to adjust to this change and keep an open mind, realizing that we are all in this together.

Just remember that: we're rolling with that change. If changing how you do #followfriday, is too much for you, we're sorry.

Now, let us never speak of this again.