Yesterday, the folks at Twitter made a big change to the way their users get messages. See my previous post for details. After a rather large uprising in their users (a la Facebook), they have gotten the message. @Biz posted this message today on Twitter.
Hey folks—thanks for your feedback, here’s a plan for #fixreplies http://bit.ly/6cSnh
The blog post linked states that while totally replacing the feature they removed is not possible due to scaling, they are working on a new feature set that will give users more control over how they see messages containing @ replies. He also allayed some fears with this part of the post:
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.
full post
This will still allow users to put another user’s name at the beginning of a post without fear that the message won’t get out. This is great for when people intentionally put someone’s name in a post to tell someone about them, however, this does little to replace the serendipitous nature of conversations on Twitter.
The way this will now work is that when someone simply types “@username” in a post, everyone will see it. But if they use the “reply” button on Twitter.com (or possibly in an API program like tweetdeck or tweetie), no one but those following both the sender and the user they are replying to will see the message.
The new feature set that @Biz has promised might fulfill that part of it, but if I’m reading his post right, we’ll have to change this on a user by user basis. It might get a little klugy for people following more than a few people to have to in to each one and set it up to receive those messages.
I’ll wait and reserve judgement on the new feature until it’s out and ready to go. But I’m hoping that they at least include some sort of batch setting process for this rather than only on a one-by-one basis.