Lighter design convey's a better spring twitter background.

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.

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.

Now whats the problem with this?  Well, everyone, and I do mean pretty much everyone, wants to get off of the Twitter website ASAP and use a client that sits on their desktop.  If not a desktop client, they are using the Twitter API in a number of other ways on another site, normally another social network mash-up site. This is because while Twitter is a great service, their UI isn’t as seamless as Tweetie for Mac or Twhirl or as popular as TweetDeck.  It’s not that Twitter’s UI is bad, its just why would anyone rather be reloading the pages on a website to see their replies rather than just switch to an already loaded tab sitting on your desktop. So really, the Twitter.com domain isn’t being hit by folks like Facebook or Myspace (as they have graphed out), rather they are relying on Twitter’s API to deliver the service. The incredible amount of API call statistics, I would assume, is not accessible by Nielsen since Twitter is a centralized service running exclusively through themselves.

I call for a new study to be published with these variables addressed, or reveal that they accurately analyzed Twitter’s retention rate with respect to Twitter’s API.

1. Only tweet links.
2. Talk about how their inbox has 1,000′s of unread emails that must be answered.
3. Constant @’s to my tweets that have nothing to do with what was said.
4. Only retweet other people’s tweets.  What, have you no thoughts of your own?
5. Celebrities or other famous-types who don’t interact with fans.
6. Celebrities or other famous-types who have someone else tweet for them.
7. Constant self promotion.
8. Ridiculous use of Adjix to gain money from links (it’s even worse if an ad is embedded into the tweet).
9. Tweet once in a blue moon. I will never see your tweets, so whats the point of following you?
10. Tweeting about completely useless information, like “I’m hungry”.  At least tell me what you are eating or going to eat; or even you inexplicable love for a particular cuisine.
11. Anyone who is rude in 140-characters or less.

What kinds of tweeple do you drop when weeding needs to be done?

Make direct message and ReTweet more accessible

Don’t make me right click to get this menu.  Make the menu appear when rolling over the picture or the ege like the reply icon as in Twhirl.  These functions are not secondary, they are primary to the twitter user.

Why are hashtag subjects (#) so gray against a gray background?

This just makes it hard to see the subject in a tweet.  Increase the contrast, it is not something that should be hidden with the background.

Everything else is pretty damn good.  Haha.  This was a shorter critique then I thought.

Picking a User name

The very first part of using twitter, once you have decided to use it for your business, is registering a user name.  There are a few things to keep in mind when coming up with a user name.  First of all, you should use your real name.  Of course, you are probably not the first company with your name, so this probably won’t be the last step in your search for a user name.  If your business name itself isn’t available, then just choose anything that is close to it.  Add “Inc”, “ORG”, or “official” to the user name to diversify your search.

Don’t make your tweets protected!

If you make your tweets protected, then only those you authorize to see your tweets will see them.  You are going for public exposure here, so enabling your tweets to be protected is counterproductive to your goal.

Enable Cell updates?

Well this option is up to you. Enabling your cell for updates not only means that you can send updates to Twitter via SMS, but also anyone who directly messages you will get sent to your phone.  For large companies, you should probably think about disabling the cell updates.  Otherwise, if you are a larger company, you could get SMS messages every other minute, and that can be quite annoying.  For smaller companies, I suggest that you do turn this on and set the cell number to whoever is handling PR in you company.  This way, a PR person has the ability to respond to a direct message faster, giving your company a good reputation for PR.

Tune in next time for an advanced explanation of Twitter Settings Area, part III of X in How to Use Twitter for Your Business