Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Twitter (yeah yeah, you knew it was coming)

Alright, so twitter has taken away the option to see replies to people that you don't follow.

This means that if i say:

@someoneyoudontfollow you don't see this in your twitter feed.

This is how i have had my settings since the beginning, there are people that i don't care to see replies to, and it would make my feed enormous -- and whenever i want a tweet to be for everyone to see, i structure it in such a way that their twitter name is not the first part of the tweet, ie:

You would see this tweet, @someoneyoudontfollow

So i am not super upset about the whole situation -- HOWEVER, i don't think that choice should be taken away. If you want to see EVERYTHING that someone says (which is available by going to the twitter website and looking at their feed) you should be able to do that. You shouldn't have to access twitter.com for functionality that is already there.

The other problem that this raises is, when people try and get around the filtering of replies, i now HAVE to see tweets that i have chosen not to see.

I stopped following JoeQ because i like following Bendis, for the most part, but their back and forth was just intolerable, so i dump the Q, and now i don't see Bendis' tweets at him. However, if he started doing the:

.@JoeQ hey, here is an inside joke, we are so great and funny, want to go for beers and talk about how we are great??

then i would see it, and be sad. So this whole situation pretty much screws over the people that DO want to see the tweets, and then they try and get around that (which i can totally understand) which screws over those that DON'T want to see the tweets.

Come on twitter, remove your head from your sphincter and restore choice.

[little update] it was suggested that "head up their ass" was a little extreme, and really, i was just being silly. I dont think that taking away choice is a good idea, even if they made the option default ON for new users to keep them from being confused and overwhelmed. My concern is a selfish one, that if people start trying to get around the filtering, my feed is going to grow exponentially and become unwieldy.

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