Offmessage

This led me to this.  Which in turn led me to this, which led me to this, which ultimately led me to buy this, which is this week’s favourite album.

Like yer man Boon says, touches of Arcade Fire and Phillip Glass.  I’d add some Flaming Lips and even some Erlend  Øye. Lovely.

Sometimes I want my tweets to be directed at a subset of my followers; a useful/interesting Python link for colleagues, an Echo Bazaar comment for other players, that kind of thing.

The way @replies are handled has created the possibility of filtered communication. I can direct messages at a particular user knowing that only those who follow it will see the message – by creating specific ‘group’ accounts and directing messages at that user I can semi-privately communicate with that user’s followers. I can’t say anything that I don’t want the curious to see (my tweets are still there on the public timeline), but if I want to shield my broader range of followers from something I know they won’t be interested in this is a useful approach.

An example is the @isotoma user. This user is pretty much exclusively followed by Isotoma staff – if I direct a message to that user only Isotoma staff will see it, allowing me to tweet Python links to my heart’s content, knowing the intended recipients will get them without putting off those who wonder what the hell I’m talking about.

What’s the real reason behind the change to @replies that was made on Twitter today?

Users used to have the choice of seeing replies (“@replies”) directed to people they didn’t follow, but the default was that they didn’t. Most users didn’t even know they had the choice to turn it on, so why disable it for those users who’d chosen to enable it?

I for one really liked the feature; many of the people I follow now were originally found by me seeing only half of what looked like a really interesting conversation. It meant that I couldn’t follow the celebrity twitterers as their tweets overwhelmed my stream but then, after a while I didn’t really want to anyway (Stephen Fry’s lovely and all, but, you know).

I guess it depends on your Twitter usage – for me, as I’ve said before, Twitter is like a big ‘ol IRC channel. If for you it’s a really only a replacement for RSS and you don’t use it very conversationally then this change probably didn’t affect you anyway.

The fact that it was possible to see those @replies directed at people you didn’t follow did bring some interesting problems for application developers. When we built QuizBot for True Knowledge there was originally Twitter integration (they seem to have taken it away now). One of the big discussions was how @quizbot_tk should respond to questions. The idea was that if a user sent their question as @quizbot_tk then QuizBot should respond as a public @reply, but if the user DM’d the question then QuizBot should respond in kind with a DM. This ended up in a long debate, ending up with me writing the following email:

Here’s my train of thought….

For the bot to be able to DM you you have to be following the bot. You can’t DM someone who is not following you. If you follow the bot to allow DMs everything that the bot tweets will appear in your stream.

If you, like me, set your preferences to show all @replies (under settings -> notices) then you will see every @reply that quizbot sends. If it got popular (as we would hope) then quizbot might be tweeting many times an hour.

This would likely cause you to unfollow the bot (I certainly would), meaning that the bot could then not DM you.

So… This means that in essence they are mutually exclusive. If we use @replies it’s likely that no one will follow the bot, meaning that we can’t use DMs at all. If we use DMs everyone must follow the bot, meaning that we can’t use @replies.

Which is how I ended up where I am now…. What do you reckon – always public or always private?

It was a weirdly serious issue for app developers and QuizBot (and no doubt many other apps) will really benefit from this change. I can’t believe it was for that reason they did it though.

So why did they take it away? There’s a blog post today responding to the (roundly negative) feedback that says it’s an engineering decision (even though they originally said it was confusing for users – just tell the truth guys). I’m assuming it must be related to reducing the complexity of copying tweets around. For example, the very big celebrity tweeters often direct 20 or 30 tweets at other users in bursts; if those tweets potentially have to passed to every one of their hundreds of thousands of followers it creates a disproportionate complexity of message delivery.

It would be interesting to see the average number of people that those that follow celebrities follow – I’m betting it would be relatively low compared to the 100 to 1000 of heavy day to day conversational users. If my bet is right this relatively small intersection of users among those that follow the celeb tweeters would hugely reduce the complexity of message delivery.

Personally I’m going to miss the feature a lot, but then like Tom said “I for one, welcome this quieter Twitter. You are so much more bearable.” It certainly means I’ll be able to follow more people, and refollow lots that I’ve unfollowed due to their volume of tweets.

In the grand scheme of things it’s annoying, but more like an insect bite than a missing leg. So no, I won’t be demanding that they #fixreplies, but I might just write a blog post about it.

http://twitter.com/proctorgamble

http://blip.fm/offmessage – oh look, it’s another web property for me to exist at and update.  That said, it’s pretty compelling.  So compelling, in fact, that I’ve had to try and ignore it.  I’ve often twittered about the music I’m listening to; blip.fm is just that service.

Damn.

jemimakiss: @JohnCleese The Twitterati demands proof!

Oh no, we shall not have another Richard Dawkins.

Please dear lord no.  Much as I am a fan of Twitter, please don’t suggest that it would make a suitable payment mechanism.  At least not until I’ve been a whole month without seeing the fail whale.

I have had a longer post about twitter brewing for a while now… Sadly, like all my other longer posts, two things get in the way of it actually making it onto the page; an anally retentive inability to be my own editor and the lack of time to write them, even if I didn’t demand so many edits and rewrites of myself.

So, to break the back of this one, let’s just chuck some points down:

Twitter is a despite, not a because application. By this I mean that I love it despite its implementation, not because of it.

This is an anomaly on today’s web. Most applications we love (and talk about) are simple, elegant, easy to use, fill a real need. To find an application that I find utterly compelling (and stick with) despite my huge frustrations is a real eye opener. That said, both SMS and email were nigh on unusable when I first started using them. Which leaves me on to my second point…

Twitter is not a microblogging platform (made all the more obvious by the fact that Twitter themselves use Tumblr for their status blog). Twitter, to me anyway, is like one huge global IRC channel – but with the added ability to tune in and out of people or topics at will.

Those who’ve got used to signing in to tens of channels using screen will know what I mean. Twitter is a handier version of this, with multiple entry points and a better way of searching the logs. A while back Jemima Kiss tweeted (what else) that her IM usage had completely dropped off since she started using Twitter; she’s not alone.

At work where I’m plugged into the Internet firehose in so many ways already Twitter isn’t as important, but it’s certainly the first one I choose to connect at the weekend. So, like SMS and email, the combination of immediacy, ignorability and permanency makes for an extremely compelling communication medium.

What that IM/email/SMS like nature brings is a sense of the private, even though it’s actually very very public indeed. This blurring of the public and private can be dangerous. Someone I follow recently twittered from a meeting: “being asked by xxx at xxx how to evolve a horizonal xxx site to cover the vertical niches they’re losing customers to…”. He’s followed by 350 people, all of whom are in the same industry. 5 minutes later he tweets “i regretted that twitter as soon as i hit enter…”. No shit. This isn’t a private IRC channel or IM conversation. Even I have followers I don’t know (Hi, by the way, aren’t I fascinating?)

The loose coupling between social groups that tempts you into forgetting about the public and private allows for some beautiful serendipity. The use of the @username syntax means that I get to see who my friends are having conversations with, and in turn possibly find interesting people. Generally I don’t start following them on Twitter, but more often than not their blog will end up in my RSS reader.

But, this loose coupling and rapid spread of information has its down sides too. There’s is no such thing as provenance on Twitter. Lots of us got duped by the fake Richard Dawkins. Luckily it didn’t do any real harm; he was good enough to get us following him but then couldn’t really do anything with it. Someone more subtle could be a lot more dangerous. It only took 4 days from me first following the fake Richard Dawkins account (when it had less than 100 followers) to it becoming apparent it was fake, by which time it had 1,700 followers. The desire (even need) to pass on information as quickly as possible will no doubt cause some problems. I’m not sure this is fixable. I’m not even sure it’s desirable to fix it. We just need to be careful out there.

That said, sometimes a fake account would be better than the real thing. My first rule of Twitter was formulated only a few days in… “Just because you’re popular doesn’t make you interesting.” There’s no shame in unfollowing someone. Particularly if they’re dull as ditchwater. Which leads me back to my second point above. If it’s a microblogging platform why are some of the best bloggers in the world the biggest dullards on Twitter? Because they’re talking to their friends. Because they haven’t spent the last two hours crafting those 140 characters into their public persona. And that’s OK. In fact, I think it’s really good.

Some links:

• Mashable on Twitter’s use of Tumblr
  
• Tim Bray on the “how on earth do they make money” question
• Scoble on why it’s ok to listen
• Steve Bowbrick on the topic of despite vs. because

So. @Richard_Dawkins was never actually Richard Dawkins.  That makes sense. Shame I got duped into thinking it was.  A small and ultimately pointless stunt, but annoying nevertheless. Makes you remember to always check your sources, I guess. Perhaps we need a Twitter salute (context)?

So.  I was amazed to find @Richard_Dawkins on Twitter.  I was even more amazed to find that he had engaged with it in the same way as the rest of us (telling us what he had for dinner the other night, for example). To find that he’s been hacked (or had a nervous breakdown, but I assume hacked) this morning, only a few days after starting out, is a real shame (if no great surprise).

Where next? Try again, or retire hurt?