Tuesday

Social Network

Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew (Updated)

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It’s not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter’s settings this afternoon has already momentously reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer see public answers sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn’t a small change at all, it’s huge and it’s terrible. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery.

Are you familiar with The Onion’s biting political commentator Baratunde Thurston, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case or Google’s Kevin Marks? If not, that’s too terrible – they are all really fascinating people I talk with a lot on Twitter. If you’re not following them, though, you’ll never learn them through my public conversations again. As far as you’re concerned, those conversations just silently disappeared.

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Above: I get @hamsandwich’s messages, but I won’t get the one everywhere he discusses what @japanther is doing. @japanther is, like, dead to me.

The new plot isn’t something you have to opt-in to. It’s not something you can opt-out of. It’s right for people who use 3rd party Twitter clients to read their Tweets. It’s more fundamentally closed than Facebook is; on that site I may not be able to view the profiles of strangers talking to my friends, but I can see that the conversations are happening and I can read the comments. This new Twitter plot breaks one of the fundamental rules of social activity streams: that I can learn new people by seeing who is conversing with the people I already know.

It’s crazy. Imagine the new users who are only following celebrities. Who will they be exposed to in this quieter new stream?

Information overload is a problem that people complain about a lot, but that’s how Twitter works. Here has to be some other way to deal with complaints about “weirder answers.” Perhaps it’s a tab or setting, but this silent hiding of public conversations your friends are having risks removing some of the most magical parts of Twitter. I like learning new people through the people I already know. I found out about this plot through a Tweet from the New York Era’ Patrick LaForge, who always Tweets about fascinating things. Too terrible I’ll never hear about his friends again.

Here’s no way this is vacant to last, I’m in shock that the plot was place in place at all.

Update: Just after we place this post up, the Twitter blog post was revised to include the following:
“Spotting new folks in tweets is an fascinating way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow. For example, you’ll continue to see, “Ev meeting with @biz about work stuff” even if you don’t follow @biz. To a fantastic degree be introducing better ways to learn and follow fascinating financial statement as we relief more features in this space.”

Our response? While recommendations are fascinating, I’d like to use my own discrimination in deciding who’s fascinating enough to follow. The people that individual friends of mine are conversing with is one of the best ways to do that.

Update: Booklover “Michael” left the most thorough and helpful comment in defense of this new plot that we’ve seen, not more than. It’s worth reading.

Act now while you still can. You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis, Jolie Odell and Phil Glockner.

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