Observations from Twitter’s @replies fiasco

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on May 17, 2009 in Default | 0 comments

Most of you are probably aware of the Twitter @reply issue that happened a few days ago. For those unaware, Twitter removed the option to receive all @replies from users you weren’t following. This was disabled by default so as to not confuse or possibly intimidate the user with the immense amount of tweets that would appear in the stream. Twitter for its part, passed it on as a deliberate feature removal based on “usage patterns and feedback“. A second blog post then attributed it to the engineering issues, possibly relating to scalability. A third blog post then revealed Twitter decided to halfway backtrack on the change, only hiding messages which explicitly use the reply icon.

The users made their voice heard in a manner which was reminiscent of Digg’s HD-DVD backlash a little over two years ago. Users started tweeting in revolt of the feature change and tagging their replies with #fixreplies. Secondly, a lot of users found a way around the system. By preceding the username by “to:” or “>” users could send out a tweet addressed to a single user but distributed to all.

Key Observations

1. Twitter could have avoided a PR Disaster had they come clean with the issue to begin with. Removing a feature which was disabled by default (due to its possibly overwhelming nature) but still important to the power users and then further on miscommunicating the reason for its removal seemed like an insult to the intelligence of its user base. Leaving very little unchanged after the backtrack showed its feeble attempts at displaying a backbone of sorts.

2. When the users started ‘forcing’ replies to all their followers by their workarounds, that was, in principle, not very different to what Twitter was doing. Twitter’s removal of the option took away the choice from the users to view the replies, whereas the workaround forced by a single user took away the choice from his/her followers to not receive them.

Neither Twitter nor the users stand wrong or right. The company owns the service and has the right to change the product in any manner it pleases. The users will voice their opinions and try their best to get their way. We’ve seen this in the case of Digg, we’ve seen this in the case of Facebook too. The best thing to do is to learn the lesson from the incident, which in this case was the mishandling of communication and make sure at least that is avoided for next time.