
Twitter’s Response to #fixreplies: We Can’t - alexfarran
http://mashable.com/2009/05/13/twitter-fixreplies/
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jrockway
"We can't" has got to be a blatant lie. It worked two days ago.

Let's say they changed the architecture so that @replies go to a dedicated
queue, and not to the public timeline queue. The solution is simple, then...
make two copies when posting, one for each destination. But I don't think this
is the issue, since supposedly mutual followers will see the @reply in your
public timeline. So I really don't get it.

Twitter--. They are either incompetent, or are lying.

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ivankirigin
I wouldn't trivialize the scaling issues at a company growing 100% monthly.

The scaling issue was technically the second excuse. They initially said it
was a user experience issue.

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dws
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that both are true. They
may have been pondering user experience when scaling needs pushed them into
making a decision.

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znbailey
It looks like they announced they will be making a concession to bring back at
least some of the old behavior:

<http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html>

The jist: they're bringing back the old behavior only when the message starts
with @username (and hasn't been created clicking the reply icon).

It sounds like they made a technical change which trumps the actual message
content with a piece of reply-to metadata, which is either explicitly included
by the client or parsed by their infrastructure.

Previously I believe it was "dumb" and didn't examine anything, and it was up
to the client to filter based on the content of the message when it came to
showing half-conversations.

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tlrobinson
I'm confused. We'll no longer see @replies from people we don't follow? If so,
that's awful.

Good thing Twitter bought Summize, as it's quickly becoming the most useful
part of Twitter. Search "to:username" gives you this exact functionality.

~~~
dreish
I believe the scenario is:

    
    
      Your username: you
      You are following: friend
      You are not following: stranger.
    

stranger tweets: @friend #Scala works4me (using jcl.Conversions) where is your
pain point?

friend tweets: @stranger I wish the would be like Clojure or better work on an
Iterator instead of lists

The way it worked before, you would have the option to see both of these
messages, one of these, or none of these. Now you get to see none of them.
@you tweets are unaffected.

I'm finding it hard to find a clear description of this anywhere, so I might
be incorrect.

~~~
smokinn
I was wondering about this too. I've been looking it up and have come to the
same conclusion.

Personally, I liked seeing conversation fragments. If the reply looked
interesting I could easily enough click on the other person's username to load
their tweets and get the question/conversation.

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windsurfer
I know I probably shouldn't do this, but... the basic problem with Twitter, as
it relates to discussions, is it's severe restriction on num

