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One of the great things I like about Twitter is ‘overhearing’ conversations between people you follow, and others they are following - it’s a great way to find even more interesting people to follow.
Unfortunately the people at Twitter don’t seem to agree with me, a new update to their blog today: How @replies work on Twitter (and how they might) highlights a couple of changes they’ve made to how @ replies are handled.
For those of you who aren’t up on the whole Twitter thing yet, when you include @username in your tweet, you’re signalling to everyone that you’re directing your reply at that person. The new changes to Twitter will only show those @replies in your timeline if you are following both the person who tweets and the person who the tweet is directed at. More recently, all @replies that were sent from people you follow we also sent to you regardless of whether you follow the person being addressed or not.
The ability to ‘listen in’ to these additional conversations hasn’t been removed, however they’ve changed the default setting to reflect their new take on what @replies should represent. To restore your account to the ‘old’ settings, you need to set @ replies to ‘Show all @ replies’ in the ‘notices’ tab of your twitter account:
They also have a few bugs to iron out, which makes changing this to the default view a little bizzare IMO. @replies are only recognised if @ is the first character in the message, and only the first username is selected for the reply (it can’t handle more than one @ in the one tweet). Personally those issues won’t bother me too much as I use Twhirl for the majority of my twittering and it handles both those situations rather well.
It’s up to you how you use Twitter, but I know I like seeing all those fragments of conversations, it’s where some of the best stuff is hidden.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, my username is martyj
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