Why did Twitter make some tweets invisible?

May 13, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

Twitter users, here’s the obscure but possibly important "small settings update" the company may have made to your account’s configuration: If, under the Notifications panel on the Settings page, you had changed the default setting to either "all @ replies" or "no @ replies," your setting has been reset back to the default: Replies sent from people you follow to people you don’t won’t appear in your public timeline.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says on the company’s official blog that the change was a response to user behavior . But Download Squad writer Jay Hathaway thinks the company was worried about an increasing number of one-way replies to celebrities who don’t reply back. This, Hathaway suspects, make Twitter look like a home for unread fan mail rather than an active ecosystem of two-way, three-way and more-way conversations.

I think Hathaway is probably right. If Twitter only wanted to change the default for most users, why didn’t it leave "Show me all @ replies" as an option?

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About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • swag
    You can't be serious. Do you honestly believe that Twitter made this change as a user-based decision -- because their "flawed" user experience was holding back all sorts of usage growth potential?

    Graph problems scale geometrically. And showing conversations of friends to others extends the graph. You can be assured that Twitter saw another perfect storm of a performance meltdown coming and this is simply a way to head it off at the pass.
  • Nice succinct summary of the issue!

    Every business as it scales finds itself with customers at different stages of engagement. So it brings to light the fact that twitter needs to scale its marketing communication team to build a customer funnel and deal with all customer touch points the right way instead of reacting to one set of customers and displeasing a big group of others.

    My personal advice would be to engage its own community to find solutions. It will work on twitter, what is better for conversations with customers!
  • Twitter....engage with their users/customers? roflmao, thanks, that's the best one I've heard in a while!
  • While not an entirely bad theory, @aplusk and @mrskutcher are both TweetDeck / Seesmic Desktop users so they'd be getting those one-way @replies.
  • swag
    Let's also not forget this "user-based decision" came less than three days on the heels of a well publicized service meltdown.