Do Twitter need to #fixreplies?

For those still not in the know, Twitter is a micro blogging site where people can post 140 characters about anything. You can follow people, or be followed (provided you make your tweets public) by anyone. You can follow me here.

I’m sorry to anyone who loved being able to see every single @reply from everyone they followed, but I am one of the ones who hated it, so please, #dontfixreplies!

Twitter can be noisy at times, when friends are tweeting live about sporting events, when celebrities are getting chatty, when several people you follow start a conversation, and so on, these are comments posted by people you follow, and your choice of viewer can easily get filled with a hundred tweets in between views.

There used to be an option to follow all @replies, this meant you could look at replies from people you were following, to other people who you weren’t following. Then there was the “only people I follow” option, which was my preferred, and the default choice, then there was an option not to see any @replies, you had to choose to click on the @replies on the Twitter page.

I don’t know how people could cope following all @replies, the one sided comments quickly get out of hand, and unless you are a serial follower, nothing is in context, so you generally miss the point. I can only see this being of use to people who are trying to build their network by following people who chat to people you  already follow. Surely #followfriday is all about building your network though?

Anyway, I was one of the people who was affected by a bug in Twitter, it meant I could see all @replies from everyone I followed, and I had to stop following several people and considered leaving Twitter because of it. It became a flood of useless information for me. I was not alone, and they received enough complaints about it to remove the setting.

One would hope that this was done with a little analysis, and they checked which setting the majority of people used, before making any changes, so that the most popular solution was implemented. I also assume they are working on a way to fix this option, but either way, I am happy. The tweets I read are not fractured conversations, they are either open statements, or directed at me, just how I like it.

Ahhh, peace at last.