Earlier this week, Twitter changed “replies” to “mentions” and also changed the algorithm of how the conversations formerly known as replies is presented to the user. Here is a tidbit from their blog post announcing the change:
Why The Update?
The @Replies feature was introduced because we noticed lots of folks putting the @ symbol in front of Twitter usernames as a way of addressing one another. For example: @biz what are you drinking in your avatar? (It’s a soy latte.) So, we started linking the @username references and collecting any tweets that began with @username on one page to make them easier to track.
However, folks started getting more inventive as they often do. Now people include @username mentions in the middle of tweets as a way to simply reference another account. For example: I’m flying @jetblue to Boston. Also, folks reference multiple accounts in a single tweet like this: I’m flying @jetblue to Boston with @ev @crystal and @goldman.
This is both bad and good. If someone tweeted out a question and I wanted to reply, I would start with @username and then my tweet. This worked well and everyone did this because it was the only way to guarantee the recipient saw your post. Of course, 3rd party Twitter applications sprang up that searched Twitter.com for mentions of your name and put it in the replies section to appear like it was a reply even though Twitter didn’t officially consider that a reply and if your app was doing an API call for “replies” a mention of your username somewhere in the middle of a tweet wasn’t recognized.
The developers workaround of searching twitter for your name worked fine but for everyone else using Twitter.com didn’t know people were talking about them. Most mainstream users went to their replies and didn’t see anything and then moved on. Occasionally, they would wise up and do a Twitter search for mentions of their name but that was tedious and simply a vanity search.
I can understand why Twitter did this. It helps users of Twitter’s Web Interface see every mention of their name and not just tweets that started with their name. They’re also making API changes so developers have an easier time including every mention on the replies tab of their applications. Now that we’re all caught up. I wanted to bring up why this change is a bad thing.
The style of the reply is based on a reference to a particular user and then a tweet. This is a unique style that started appearing in early 2007 before Twitter even supported replies officially. Even @username didn’t make a link back to someone else and there was no replies tab to see when someone mentioned your name. The style of the reply was a reference to the user you’re directing your reply toward “@username” and then a space and then your reply. It never evolved or changed because if you didn’t do it that way, the intended recipient wouldn’t see it on their replies tab.
With the recent change a reply may turn into, “I completely agree with your statement and wish we could work on this together @username”. Now the intended recipient still gets the reply in their mentions tab on Twitter.com which is good but this is the fundamental problem. When I look at my Twitter stream and decide to read a tweet that is clearly not a reply, I’ll discover at the end of the tweet that it was actually a reply I was looking at and not a unique thought.
For current users of the system, we’ll continue to use the traditional replies style but the new users might adopt a different style so it will cause confusion and generally lead to a change in style. Evolution happens all of the time so I’m sure we’ll adopt but this change is a sign of Twitter simply conforming to a community change and embracing it. I like that idea but they have to be careful about adopting features this way because the community isn’t always right.