On Tuesday Twitter made what they called a “small settings update” so that you would no longer see @replies to people you don’t follow. They called them “one-sided fragments” and “undesirable”. For 99.9% of the humans on the planet, this was fine. For the Twitter power users it was like “kaboom” — here’s a sampling of the ire poured out in the blogosphere:

• Twitter Decides We’re Not Smart Enough For @Replies, Changes Them Again

• Twitter Reverses Policy Change, For Now. This is Nuts But Here’s How It Works

• Twitter: don’t worry, not even its inventors understand it

• The Ongoing Mystery That is Twitter

• Twitter’s Spectacularly Awful 24 Hours

So, like Facebook when the users revolted, the Twitter team had to retweet retreat:

“So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.”

Got that? Me neither.

Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out the following:

• Twitter is free.

• They owe you nothing.

• Nobody is forcing you to use it.

• Nothing in this world is perfect.

• If Twitter is the only way you meet and/or keep up with people, you might want to step away from the keyboard and give them a call. Or go see them. You may have noticed that it’s Spring now.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on May 14, 2009 - 10:10 am

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