This post is a follow up to Twitter Is A Cocktail Party by Jon Reid – follow him @jonmreid
Picture yourself in the crowded party shown above. In a party without chairs, little clusters of conversation form, and the makeup of those clusters changes quickly as people wander around. You may join a cluster because you know one of the people in it, or because you happen to overhear something interesting. Parties like this are sometimes called “mixers,” which the dictionary defines as “a social gathering where people can make new acquaintances.” Twitter was the biggest mixer in the world until Tuesday, May 12, 2009, when those conversations fell silent.
The @replies Option
Until recently, Twitter had an “@replies” option that determined which replies you saw. The choices were so confusing that it needed an explanatory link, but even the explanation was confusing! Let me use a diagram to illustrate the choices and what they meant.
Consider this scenario: You are following A.
A replies to B: “@B blah blah”
The question is, do you see that reply or not?
If your setting was “all @ replies” then you would see the reply.
If your setting was “@ replies to the people I’m following” then you would see the reply only if you also followed B.
If your setting was “no @ replies” then you wouldn’t see the reply even if you also followed B.
It is important to note that this has nothing to do with someone replying directly to you. It’s all about replies to other people. And the fact that I have to add that shows that even with a diagram, my explanation is tricky to understand.
The Curtain Falls
Apparently, these options were not only confusing; something in the way they were implemented was actually causing Twitter to bog down. Remember, Twitter was not originally designed with replies in mind; replies were a user-driven convention which they added. But this means Twitter’s underlying infrastructure couldn’t keep up with things as the number of users increased. I suspect that the competition between Ashton Kutcher and CNN Breaking News to get a million followers was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Kutcher has 1,793,588 followers as of this writing, so when he posted a single reply, the Twitter software had to make millions of decisions.
So on May 12, Twitter changed things. There was no longer an option: We now see replies only if we are are also following the recipient. In the diagram above, if you do not follow B, you will not see the reply. While this change may have been necessary for technical reasons, the practical outcome was that it largely ended Twitter’s function as a mixer or cocktail party. You now only see general statements, or replies to your personal clique (the people you are following).
Let me illustrate the problem with an actual conversation about the change. I alerted my friends with a tweet reading, “FYI Twitter just made it so you can no longer see replies to people you don’t follow.” I received the following reply from my friend Julie, or @astrowebgirl:
This is a common misunderstanding about the original options, and about the change which makes it a very important question. I replied,
I think this was a useful exchange that might have benefited many people. So how many people saw it? In days past, many of Julie’s 1,737 followers would have seen her side, many of my 375 followers would have seen mine; anyone who was curious could click through to explore the other side, possibly finding an interesting new person to follow. That is a potential audience of 2,000 people.
But I really doubt that we have any followers in common. So the number of people who saw this (besides myself and Julie) is probably a big fat zero.
Right there, I think you can see how Twitter has been unusually beneficial in the past at transmitting information and enabling new connections. Less so today.
So Now What?
There was an immediate uproar in the Twitter community about this, largely through the #fixreplies tag and also through blog posts. And it seems Twitter got the message. They cannot simply restore things because the old options really were creating problems, but they have promised to develop a new feature that will let us see more tweets again.
That’s the good news, and it is good news. Until then, there are a few things we users can do:
- Be aware that you are not seeing all tweets.
- Occasionally click on people’s profiles to see their replies to people other than your friends.
- Be aware that if you post a reply, very few people will see it.
- If you want to reply more publicly, do not click reply or begin with @username.
That last point deserves an example. If I tweet something that you want to reply to, but you want your reply to be seen by people who don’t follow me, don’t click the reply arrow 
in the Twitter web interface (or whatever you do in your client), and don’t begin your message with my username, @jonmreid. Instead, start typing a regular tweet, and use some characters as a prefix at the beginning, such as “> ” which people are used to seeing in email replies. I suggest two characters, something and a space, to keep your name clickable in all Twitter clients. For example,
> @jonmreid Thank you for explaining about @ replies. I look forward to seeing what new thing Twitter implements.
@goodwordediting
Thanks for the explanation. I didn’t understand the change until I read this post.
@gatortodd
Thanks – I didn’t get all the uproar back in May! Hard to understand through tweets.
@DaveCharest
This @ reply thing really is confusing. Thanks for helping make sense of it. It seems you can also make a reply public by adding a period at the beginning. As such .@DaveCharest
@phillipgibb
Sounds all necessary if you ask me. I believe the option should be in the control of the user – if you enjoy the cocktail bar and wanna stay there like I do then so be it. But please don’t put cubicles in the bar – that just sux.
@jackspideriii
So would you say a fair assessment is the true @reply is, at the moment, only useful in getting the attention of someone not following you?
Great article.
@sherryayn
Thanks Jon. I usually just searched the twitter name if I wanted to see the stream. I did like it when you could click on a tweet and see the entire conversation.
Hopefully that’ll come back. Cheers! and great work again!
@MsMomentum
Well said Phillip.
@bashen
Adding a character in front of the @reply works for those who like seeing “all @ replies” but for those who originally chose to see “no @replies” or only “@ replies to the people I’m following”, this adds extra tweets/noise to their stream. After Twitter made the change, I found some people using this technique to many of their @replies so they would be seen by everybody.
Given the current situation there is no perfect solution but I hope those using this technique use it wisely and judiciously.
@alexschleber
Well explained, I was truly perplexed by the change. The only reasonably good current work-around is to import as many of your Tweeps into FriendFeed (either if they are already there, or cajoling them to join, or as so-called “Imaginary Friends” FF imported feeds), where you will still get everyone’s complete tweet stream.
Unfortunately there are usability issues there as far as easy replies/RTs/etc. via FriendFeed, though some of us are hard at work lobbying FF to improve some of those aspects. E.g. it would be great if there could be a wholesale or simple 1-click import of non-FF Twitter friends as “Imaginary Friends”. Also, it’s a huge drawback that FF’s automatic ff.im shortlinks are currently without viewable stats.
But again, all better than being cut off from much of the action completely.
@jonmreid
Philip, nice analogy. I hope Twitter offers a good solution. In the meantime though, it has been long enough now that I am forgetting the “feel” of how it used to be.
Brian, that’s an important point. Folks, it’s probably kind to pick and choose which replies might be interesting to third parties. Don’t just use the workaround for every little reply.
Alex, I have yet to make the jump to FriendFeed but continue to hear good things about it. One of these days, I suppose…
@doug_caldwell
TKS for explanation. Even as one of the 10% group making 90% of tweets, I wasn’t aware of this change. Always something more to learn with social media.
@libertygrrrl
Thx for info. What about if instead of @reply people RT? I like to remind pepes of a little of the original convo/tweet so they can easily follow my meaning without looking around too much etc.
@mitchellkoch
I think avoiding using the reply arrow is a bad option, because then it makes it impossible to understand what you were replying to, unless you really try to include all the context in the content of the message. And if people are replying to each other, just one person not using the reply arrow can break the whole thread.
Does it work to just not put the @name directly at the beginning? Even if it doesn’t, the “in reply to” feature is important enough not to break. People can still find your @reply tweets by looking directly at your tweets, but sometimes it can be impossible to determine which message you were replying to unless you use the reply arrow.
@Viralwordpress
Very informative.
Thanks so much for the great insights into Twitter, once again.
@DDGriffith
A great article. Thank you for mapping out, what has been, a pretty tangled pathway for many.
@staceyharmon
Best explaination I’ve seen. Love the diagram. Thanks for making this important issue simpler to explain!
@jonmreid
Dave, yes, any character will work. I have switched from ‘>’ to ‘-’ because it is less obtrusive, taking less space in a proportional font. Your ‘.’ is probably the narrowest character there is! But whatever character you use, I suggest adding a space between it and the @name so that Twitter clients will turn it into a clickable name.
John, even the workaround will get the attention of someone who is not following you because they will see it in their @mentions. The only reason for the workaround is to make your pseudo-reply visible to all of your followers. As Brian says, use this judiciously. I use the reply mechanism to write my reply; then I look at what I wrote and ask, “Would this be of interest to anyone else?” If I think it might, then I employ the workaround.
Liz, I see, you RT a bit of context and then tag your reply at the beginning or end? To me, a retweet has a particular meaning, “I read this and think it’s worth passing on to everyone.” If that’s not your intent, what you might do is use your client’s RT mechanism to begin your tweet, but change the ‘RT’ to something else. Make something up — maybe it will catch on!
Mitchell, the workaround does break threaded replies, and that really is unfortunate. In my experiments, I found that it was not enough to add characters before the @name; you really do have to break the thread.
But threading itself is a fairly new feature; it wasn’t that long ago that to find out what someone was replying to, I had to do a search for that person’s @name and figure it out from context. The workaround just bumps us back to those pre-threaded days.