Only Twitter can say nothing with 134 words
Honestly I’ve seen more information conveyed in a single 140 character tweet than I have in the latest 134 word or 809 character (including spaces) blog post from twitter.
In a post titled “Whoa, Feedback”, Biz Stone managed to say almost nothing useful about the recent decision to change the way “@replies” work on the twitter service except to tell us that:
The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.
Okay, so quick question. Why the heck did you guys introduce the feature in the first place if it never would have “lasted long”?
What are these “serious technical issues” and why does the engineering team need to “remind” the co-founder that they exist? Why weren’t these addressed before the feature was ever implemented?
You don’t need to go “brainstorming a way to surface a new, scalable way to address this need“, you just need to fix it.
You have a great method and system that people are not only using, but as you can see from the feedback, are familiar with and passionate about.
Quit wasting time. Just fix it.
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This is really simple. This is the only way to say “we are going to take it back” without then annoying the people that actually like the new implementation.
Reality Check, with the “old way” was was the difference between a regular tweet and an “@ reply” other than it showed up in the @reply list of the reciever. Nothing. It was just another tweet. So what is it exactly that could have “broken” or “not scaled”?
Twitter is trying to play a balancing act to “satisfy everybody” and I just hope that in the process they don’t ruin it and satisfy nobody.