Twitter Makes Detrimental Move
A few days ago, twitter made a change to their mention feature... and it's not a good one. Previously. mentions worked as follows.:
Say I were to ask David what he though of last nights episode of lost- I would simply say this:
@thecreativeone What did you think of the last episode of lost. If David chose to respond, he might say @kwa22122 I haven't seen it yet.
Now, my mention to David would show up in my twitter feed, and his reply... would show up in his.
Now, all of that has changed. According to Twitter, their users were annoyed by seeing "one side of a conversation". Therefore, they have made the decision to only have mentions show up in your twitter feed if you are following both David and I. If you aren't, you will not see any of the conversation, essentially making the majority of conversations on Twitter direct messages.
In my opinion, this latest decision defeats the point of twitter. The whole purpose of the site is to be a social networking mini blog, where you meet people you may or may not know. And to be completely honest, those "one sided conversations" have caused me to click through to new users, to complete the conversation for myself. This is how I have found new users on twitter, and expanded my social network. Also, as David said when we spoke about this, he wants to see the conversation I am having with others because that is the point of Twitter.
To be fair to Twitter, they say in their blog, that they are working on a new way for mentions to work, and this new system will be an option for the user. (Something this latest change should have been in the first place.) But, here is my true problem with all of these changes. None of them are necessary! No, twitter is not perfect, but as a whole, the service and its' features were pretty solid. As the old saying goes, don't fix it if it isn't broken. Nothing could be more true in this case.
That being said, I guess we're all going to have to wait and see what Twitter implements. I hope it is a change for the better, but if I'm being honest, I would like things to revert back to the way they were.
Kyle Ankney
Reader Comments (1)
Somebody copyrighted the @ sign and is givivg twitter a hard time? perhaps.. perhaps not but there are keys on the keyboard that have been copyrighted before, microsoft being the latest holder of one these copyrights themselves. so it is not out of the question.