Comments on: Twitter WAS A Cocktail Party

By: Jon Reid

Jon Reid — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:11:09 +0000

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.

By: Stacey Harmon

Stacey Harmon — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:29:04 +0000

Best explaination I’ve seen. Love the diagram. Thanks for making this important issue simpler to explain!

By: David D. "Griff" Griffith

David D. "Griff" Griffith — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:03:09 +0000

A great article. Thank you for mapping out, what has been, a pretty tangled pathway for many.

By: Bill White

Bill White — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:36:06 +0000

Very informative.
Thanks so much for the great insights into Twitter, once again.

By: Mitchell Koch

Mitchell Koch — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:08:18 +0000

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.

By: Liz

Liz — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:54:16 +0000

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.

By: Doug Caldwell

Doug Caldwell — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:07:55 +0000

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.

By: Jon Reid

Jon Reid — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:34:45 +0000

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…

By: Alex Schleber

Alex Schleber — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:20:47 +0000

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.

By: Brian Ashenfelter

Brian Ashenfelter — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:04:09 +0000

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.