Dear Twitter, Please Fix Your @s

in Social Media Moms Twitter by Teeg — June 25, 2009 at 7:13 am | 7 comments

Once upon a time, twitter had no @s.

If you wanted someone in particular to see your tweet, you used their name and hoped they’d catch it.

Then people started using @ in front of the name so others would know who the tweet was directed to.

Twitter saw it, and thought it was good.

Then Twitter decided to multiply the goodness and allow @ to link to a tweeter’s page and added a link for people to see their own @s if they wanted to check.

And it was still good.

Then Twitter decided to allow people a choice of whether they wanted to see others @s or not. And some chose to see and comment on others @s and others preferred that @s stayed covered.

And still, all was good.

But then twitter decided to take away all choice. And allowed no one to see @s that didn’t involve them.

And it was NOT good. And lots of people complained and wanted to show their @s.

So twitter backed down, but only part way. And they allowed people to show their @s only if the other person already knew both the @ser and the @see.

And this is where it gets serious.

Because before twitter covered their @s, when someone I respected carried on a public conversation with someone I didn’t know, I’d get a good idea of what the new person was like, and could follow them if I wanted.

Not only that, if it was a conversation that I had additional information about, I could join in and share what I knew.

The majority of my first twitter friends were made this way, by enjoying conversations and wanting to get to know someone better; people like Susan Reynolds, Connie Reece, BarbaraKB, Dr Mani, jjprojects, Tindle, and the list could go on and on.

In fact, I’d bet that many of us made new friends that way.

Since twitter took away the option of seeing others’ @s, I’ve noticed a dramatic change in my following.

Before the change, out of 10 new followers, at least 3 or 4 would be real people and not spammers or bots. After it, I’m lucky if 1 out of 10 new adds is a real person unless I’ve participated in a #chat recently.

Coincidence? Possibly, after all twitter has gone big time lately.

But still, I think it’s at least partly a matter of @s covering.

Tags: @ BarbaraKB Connie Reece Dr. Mani Follow jjprojects NASA Oprah Susan Reynolds Tindle Twitter White House