Twitter Screws Up
I don't often use this space to rant, but I'm up early with a small child and I'm a bit peeved at the moment. And my peevishness has something to do with software development, so it's moderately on-topic.
The target: Twitter, which in a "small settings update" decided to make things much less useful for those of us who use the service to discover new people. It used to be that if you followed Joe and he tweeted "@Mary: Like your new blog post on wombats" you'd see that update in your Twitterstream even if you didn't follow Mary (more precisely, you could turn on an option to make this happen). Then if you were interested in wombats, you could click through to @Mary's account and decide whether you wanted to follow her. Easy serendipity.
Now the option is gone, "to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies" and a unilateral declaration that the old behavior is undesirable. Horseshit. If it's confusing to new users, then change the default for the setting, don't remove it entirely. Seems to me that one of two things is going on here. Either this change was necessary for performance reasons (in which case Twitter's spin on the issue is a lie), or else this is another instance of the pernicious developer arrogance that says "we know better than our users." Either way, it stinks.
Will this be the end of Twitter? Nope. But if the change isn't reversed (which will mean Twitter is deaf to the crescendo of #fixreplies tweets), it'll make the service less useful to a significant number of users. And that's a shame.
Update: In a new blog post, Biz writes: "The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt." Compare that with the wording from the first post: "However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option." It is difficult to come to any conclusion from those two statements other than the simple: Twitter lied.
I'll miss the feature. I'll miss even more the thought that I could trust Twitter to be open and transparent with its users.
The target: Twitter, which in a "small settings update" decided to make things much less useful for those of us who use the service to discover new people. It used to be that if you followed Joe and he tweeted "@Mary: Like your new blog post on wombats" you'd see that update in your Twitterstream even if you didn't follow Mary (more precisely, you could turn on an option to make this happen). Then if you were interested in wombats, you could click through to @Mary's account and decide whether you wanted to follow her. Easy serendipity.
Now the option is gone, "to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies" and a unilateral declaration that the old behavior is undesirable. Horseshit. If it's confusing to new users, then change the default for the setting, don't remove it entirely. Seems to me that one of two things is going on here. Either this change was necessary for performance reasons (in which case Twitter's spin on the issue is a lie), or else this is another instance of the pernicious developer arrogance that says "we know better than our users." Either way, it stinks.
Will this be the end of Twitter? Nope. But if the change isn't reversed (which will mean Twitter is deaf to the crescendo of #fixreplies tweets), it'll make the service less useful to a significant number of users. And that's a shame.
Update: In a new blog post, Biz writes: "The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt." Compare that with the wording from the first post: "However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option." It is difficult to come to any conclusion from those two statements other than the simple: Twitter lied.
I'll miss the feature. I'll miss even more the thought that I could trust Twitter to be open and transparent with its users.