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replies posts

Filed under: Business, Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter responds to @reply uproar, announces changes


After about a day with "#fixreplies" as a trending topic, Twitter has responded to the very vocal crowd of users who disliked their new @reply settings. Things aren't exactly getting changed back, but there will be a temporary fix, and then an improved version of the old @reply options on the way.

Here's what Twitter had to say about it:

First, we're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

Second, we've started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow. This will be a per-user setting and it will take a bit longer to put together but not too long and we're already working on it.

So, call off the dogs and wait to see what the new settings look like. Perhaps Twitter users will end up with something better than what they had in the first place.

Filed under: News, web 2.0, Web

Twitter changes @reply settings again, users protest


When the Twitter team was first figuring out how people liked to use the site's public reply feature, it introduced a set of three options for seeing @replies: you could either see replies to and from people you follow, from people you follow to anyone else (regardless of following), or no @replies at all. It was a decent system, and it gave people a choice about how much noise they wanted @replies to make.

Twitter has now removed the option, and the new default for every user is that @replies that are both to and from someone you follow will be visible, but other @'s won't. The change was announced in a blog post called Small Settings Update. The move appears to have been made because an overwhelming number of users had been using replies this way, but I'm already seeing a bit of a frenzy in my normally-calm Twitter stream from people who liked discovering new users by seeing their friends @ them.

Perhaps the recent popularity of Twitter as a way to contact celebrities -- we're post-Oprah here, people -- made users a little sick of seeing the people they followed replying to celebrities they didn't follow or care about. There's a fairly simple solution to that, though: change the @reply settings yourself. I'm not sure what Twitter gained by removing the option, but I'm sure it will become clear when they respond to the backlash. My prediction: the settings go back to normal by the end of the week, or we hear a much better reason for the change.

Filed under: Web services, Freeware, Social Software

Twitter Replies rebranded as "Mentions"

Twitter MentionsTwitter has made a change to the way users can track when they are mentioned by other Twitterers. The Replies page is no longer, and instead has been replaced by Mentions. To be more accurate, the Replies page has been changed into a Mentions page, though the URL twitter.com/replies remains the same.

What does this mean? In the sidebar of your Twitter page, rather than the word Replies, you'll see your @name, in my case @jasonclarke. That page now shows not only tweets where other people mention you at the beginning of the tweet (a regular reply), but also in any tweet that contains your @name. Fortunately, the setting that allows you to ignore @replies to Twitter users that you do not also follow still acts as you would expect.

It's an obvious move to give users the ability to see any time they are mentioned in a tweet, but it's a bit odd that Twitter chose to replace the Replies page rather than simply add a new Mentions one. It seems like it would be valuable to some users to be able to focus in on replies as opposed to any mention, particularly for heavy Twitter users.

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Web

Twitterfriends gives you the stats on your Twitter network

With all the uproar about third-party Twitter app security and authorization, I thought it would be nice to talk about a Twitter site that works without logging in. Twitterfriends generates statistics about your conversations on Twitter: what percentage of your posts are @replies? What percentage are links? Who do you talk to the most? Twitterfriends can tell you all of this.

It also provides a visual representation of the network of people you @reply with. It can even go to the next step, and show your friends of friends. That's all without putting in a password.

If you do feel like logging in, you can see who in your network is inactive, and who's online - presumably based on the time of their latest tweet. This can be handy if you're looking to prune back an overgrown network. Mostly, though, Twitterfriends is a fun way to find out about and evaluate how you're using Twitter.

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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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