Note: If that title makes no sense to you then you should probably skip this entry. If you are on Twitter and the title makes sense to you but you don’t know exactly why then prerequisite reading is a series of posts by @Biz on the twitter blog: Small Settings Update, Whoa, Feedback!, We Learned A Lot and finally The Replies Kerfuffle. It should be pointed out that this is exactly how a company/service should be interacting with it’s customers/users.
In the most recent post Biz starts off saying:
We removed a setting that 3% of all accounts had ever touched but for those folks it was beloved.
I find that figure hard to believe, of course they know better than I do but I know I used it and tend to think most of my friends did too, at least the uproar I saw in my own stream and the replies that were sent to me when I was talking about that make me feel that way. Biz goes on to note it was a setting that most people never changed from the default. If I remember correctly that wasn’t always the case and originally everyone saw all replies all the time, then they added the option for you to only see certain one and possibly changed the default at that point. I’m not sure about that but it’s neither here nor there honestly, the only important fact is they changed something with replies that seriously impacted some of their users.
I understand why they did it from a use standpoint and I’ve certainly heard people asking for similar changes so I thought I’d discuss a little about how I use replies and what might be good directions to go from here. I’m sure twitter has their own plans already in some form of motion but just for discussions sake I’m doing it anyway.
