Recently, twitter changed something in their @ operator handling. Though it was news to me, there was previously an option which allowed users to view their friends’ updates which were replies to non-mutual friends. Since around July of 2008, my account had automatically hidden replies of this nature, but I have realized a flaw in the new changes. Something painful.
Before I get into that, I’ll just say that some users are irritated by this modification, but from a developer’s point-of-view, twitter’s reasoning is rather sound on the grand scale. Naturally, if I were to implement it I would do it a bit differently, allowing those who follow a reasonable number of users an option to see these replies, while limiting this feature for those who either follow 3-5000+ users or the followers of those with 3-5000+ followers. In essence, it’s more efficient if new-twitter was a place where everyone was following and being followed by 10k people (god, the whole following bla bla is so geh… SUBSCRIPTIONS). That’s off the topic.
Today, once these things were in order, I realized something in my replies, or rather what was in the list of replies and not in the home view. Previously, I would see replies for all @nuclearsurprise, which still stands, but I cannot recall any time where someone I was following included @nuclearsurprise and it did not turn up in my home view. Do we see where this is going?
This happened today, when owen_s, a user I follow, mentioned @nuclearsurpise in one of his updates, a non-mutual reply to omomomo. Now why on earth did this not show up in my view? And still these updates will not show up in my follower stream, which leads me to believe either something is off in this new implementation or this is the way it is supposed to work (I’m covering all feasible grounds here, as I don’t expect a group with millions in backing to fuck up… but then again).
So given that users cannot see these non-mutual replies is whatever, but why, oh why, does this happen on non-mutual replies which include a follower’s nick?
I don’t think it was supposed to happen that way.
Ohh, now I get what people were complaining about. Yeah that’s pretty messed up, but I guess that with enough input, it will be fixed. After all, addressing a reply to multiple recipients is (or used to be) one of the positive aspects of twitter.
It is nice to be able to reply to multiple parties, but the reason it works on twitter or laconica is the full-text index on the message content, so the system can search all the messages for a word or phrase; this relies on the db and the ability of a search to be efficient, which it isn’t (best search mathematically is logN). Likely to make it more efficient these things are cached or @replies are parsed to a separate table. Laconica parses !groups and #tags as well, which I’ve taken note of.
Anyhow, yea I’m sure others will notice when they see a friends message in @reply that doesn’t show in their normal view. It should be a simple fix.
I don’t really follow the development of Twitter (most technology-related issues confuse me), but doesn’t TwitterFox solve this problem? I’ve noticed it catch replies that the main Twitter site misses.
@ETERNAL lol, yea, but why would an update from someone you follow not show up in the main view as well? Of course, replies aren’t the problem. I caught this issue because of twitterfox.