trendpreneur

The Twitterverse is currently abuzz with a small change that’s caused a big noise.

Since the start, you could view your Twitter stream in three ways – server-side, so this affected whichever method you used to browse Twitter. The options were to only show ‘broadcast’ messages, i.e. nothing starting with an @; to show @-replies between people you were following, i.e. only conversations where you knew both parties (the default); and to show all messages, including those @-replies directed at people you didn’t follow.

Quite sensibly, Twitter looked at the user behaviour – almost everyone kept to the default. Having tried out the ‘firehose’, ‘everyone’s tweets to anyone’ approach I’m not that surprised. Even when I was following around 100 people, my stream became vastly noisy and unmanageable. The idea of being able to discover new people through seeing half their conversations was nice, but without any client that can pull in the rest of the conversation, it was like overhearing a phone conversation on the train — annoying and unnecessary.

Product management decision ahoy: ‘let’s remove the option, nobody (<2%) uses it and keeping it there costs money without translating that cost into value’.

Enter TechCrunch, stage left, and suddenly — apart from a bit of whining that TC should shut up about Twitter, which is fair enough — it’s cool to demand the ‘firehose’ of @-replies back. The angle that ‘we’re not smart enough for it’ was very clever, and also downright underhand. Spinning a product management decision so that most of the product’s users, who were previously unaware of the feature’s very existence, now demand for it back… I guess it causes pageviews, but it’s simply ridiculous.

There’s a bit of a terminology hiccup which isn’t helping, in that people are getting the idea that their actual ability to reply to people they don’t follow will be hindered – it won’t – or that they won’t see replies from people who don’t follow them – er, no. Even the discovery aspect isn’t really a big problem, as there are plenty of conversations/RTs/etc that don’t start with an @ and introduce the username later in the text. Those’ll still show up.

Twitter will almost certainly have to reverse the change, and those complaining loudest about it and yelling ‘#fixreplies‘ from the rooftops will go back to not using it. In fact, I wonder if the canniest thing they could do right now is to put the @-firehose option on – the one that everyone’s complaining about missing out on – and watch the majority of users drown in confusion for an hour or two.