While I know many readers of my blog are well versed in Twitter, I have been asked a common question and I think I would publicly answer it in a quick blog post.

The question was:

I have a question. I am following people and in their tweets, Sometimes I see @-reply’s from people in my timeline and sometimes I don’t.  I want to be able to see ALL of someone’s tweets, is there a way to do this?

~Anonymous

This is a great question, here is whats going on:

Unfortunately no.  Pretty much what Twitter has done is make it mandatory to be friends with the person who is being reply to. So if I am X and you are Y and some other person is Z, If I(X) tweet Z and you(Y) don’t know Z, then you would not see my(X) reply to Z. If you knew Z however, and I @-replied to him/her, then you would see my @-reply to Z in your(Y) time-line.

There used to be an option in your settings to change this, but they removed it (I believe) to help lower traffic and also to increase privacy in conversations on twitter in a, now that I think about it, odd way.

I just want to do a really quick post about the recent Twitter changes with regard to how @reply’s are shown in your timeline.

If you don’t know already, Twitter used to have an option in the settings area that allowed you to choose whether or not you could see reply’s of a particular user you were following that were replying to another user. In short, if you don’t know the person in an @reply from a user, their tweet with that reply would not show up in your timeline feed. You could, before the controversial change, opt to see them or not.

Now you cannot see them, and that is the default setting that cannot be changed by the user anymore. The reasons for this change, again in short, is to limit the API calls (relieve stress on Twitter’s servers) and because only 3% of users enabled the option to see @reply’s to people they did not know.

The problem is that now I cannot start ANY tweet with a user name, even if its not a reply, I am just starting my tweet with their user name. For instance:

Laura sucks at running.

I would write this on twitter as:

@limerasp sucks at running.

This is not a reply to her, rather a statement that begins with her Twitter user name. With the recent change to how Twitter handles @reply’s, any user who does not follow @limerasp, will not see my publicly intended tweet.

This has happened to me about 4 to 5 times recently, and I think that its something that needs to be changed. I don’t want to add ‘Well, ” before a publicly intended tweet that starts with a user name; but thats exactly what I’m being forced to do now.

I didn’t really mind the whole @reply change at first, but I’m starting to see that it puts Twitter at both a semantically and socially disadvantaged position. I can’t say exactly what I want to say, or at least I have to add words to my tweets that I otherwise would not include, and honestly, everyone should be able to see an @reply, even if the user isn’t following that particular user. The reason is it promotes the conversation. When I follow someone, I follow them not just because I like what they are saying, but because I like THEM as a person (in-so-far as I know them). I do want to see who they are talking to, because of what I will call the Transitive Follower theory.

It’s this: It is of high likelihood that a frequent conversation between an unknown user and a user who you follow that the unknown user is a worthy follow.

Simple. Kind ofa obvious, but needs to be said.

If you don’t want your stuff public, send a DM. That’s what they are there for.