

Twitter's "Small Settings Update" Is Anything But - kpanghmc
http://www.kevinwilliampang.com/post/Twitters-Small-Settings-Update.aspx

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ajju
This is not entirely stupid. My biggest pet peeve is people who carry on what
should be IM conversations on twitter. Eg @jack are you read yet?. @jill No
doing hair. @jack hurry up!. @jill shut up! etc. Most such conversational
tweets begin with @user.

People will adapt to this. If you want your followers to discover someone you
are tweeting, just don't start the tweet with @user. @user is for
conversations. That way both conversations and recreational tweet reading can
stay alive. It makes sense to me.

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boucher
This only affects you if you only follow jack XOR jill. So, if you like them
both, you're still going to be annoyed.

~~~
ajju
Sure, but this is still an improvement over the previous situation, for me
anyway.

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tdm911
I've always had this option switched off as I found the noise was too much
(and I only follow 240 people). With all @ replies turned on you only get half
the conversation when you're not following the third person.

I found the best way to find new people to follow is to visit the profile
pages of people I find interesting and see who they are conversing with. This
way my twitter stream is not filled with @replies that are less relevant to
me.

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larrywright
This is exactly what I do, and IMO if you're following a decent number of
people it's the only viable solution. It drove me nuts when I briefly turned
on the option to see @replies to people I didn't follow. You perpetually see
half of a conversation and it makes little sense out of context.

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barredo
I'm very upset with Twitter staff about this change. They hurry up to update
the original post, even deleted some sentences, but still.

I've discovered almost 80% of my following list via replies to people i didn't
follow from people I already followed

People are using this hashtags to tweet and complain about this: #fixreplies,
#openreplies & #replygate

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AndrewO
I like it. I hated it at first, but then I looked at my feed. I could actually
find things that were interesting in less than 15 minutes (and I'm only
following 80 people). Sure this was an option before, but my inclination to
drink from the fire-hose was so great that I never even thought of turning it
off.

The OP's "hack" is a good one and I hope it catches on. Let's not forget that
"@", "RT", "OH", hash-tags and all of those other twitterisms are emergent
developments. "!" could be next (although I'd suggest "¡" for those of us with
international keyboards :).

There's also a nice concept of loudness. I can now whisper inconsequential
nothings to a group of my friends or broadcast from the rooftops.

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Silentio
I think they've taken away one of their best features. This goes to show that
very often people and organizations do not understand what makes their product
great, something budding startup starters on HN would be wise to consider. One
must be mindful of even (or maybe especially) the small things that give your
product heart.

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senko
From the Twitter user standpoint, I think the change is +-0 (no noise I'm not
interested in is down, but potentially interesting conversations/information
by my friends is not easily discoverable any more).

From API standpoint, this will force API users that relied on friends_timeline
call to return all updates (to, e.g. back them up, or forward somewhere) to
manually request timeline for each friend, so they turned the operation from
O(1) into O(N) calls, which, considering the rate limiting, is not
insignificant.

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fallentimes
Make it an option.

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tdm911
It was an option. They took it away.

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ja2ke
"We'll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts
as we release more features in this space." Twitter Pro, $4.95/mo -- "See
More™"?

