The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains three weblogs, The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, focused on business and industry analysis, the eponymous Ask Dave Taylor devoted to tech and business Q&A and The Attachment Parenting Blog, discussing topics of interest to parents. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

The Twap of Twitter's Tewwible Interface

I know, I know, that title is just agonizing. Just be glad I couldn't think of an alliterative word for "Interface" to twuly complete the thought!

In an interesting bit of parallelism, I sent out a brief status message on the popular service Twitter commenting upon the observation I had that I feel guilty when I decide not to follow someone in Twitterland. Here's what I saw on the Web page:

Subsequent to that, a few of my friends chimed in rather quickly with their comments:

Robin, Rob and Amy have good comments, but here's what's interesting: these are the only three responses I saw. Yet I had four people respond to me. To get to the fourth response, I had to click on the "Replies" tab, which then revealed the missing message:

Suddenly, Dennis shows up, but why doesn't that response show up in my main Twitter stream? It's a significant flaw in the design of the service and while I can mash up the streams a bit more with third-party apps, I don't really want to run yet more software on my computer. I want a version of Twitter that makes sense in terms of what it presents to me.

I'm sure I am not alone in missing these replies from people who I don't explicitly follow. Given that it's all being tracked (I mean, it's in the "Replies" tab), I just don't understand why I can't integrate them all together. Jack, you invented Twitter, perhaps you can explain?

Meanwhile, if you want to track my thrilling day to day activities and musings in the world of 140 characters or less, you can find me on Twitter as DaveTaylor.

Posted by Dave Taylor at January 24, 2008 4:39 PM

Comments

Actually it's a quirk of the settings options in twitter. If you go under the "notices" tab of settings you can set how you want the @ replies to appear (or not appear) in your timeline.

Posted by: Goldie Katsu on January 24, 2008 5:23 PM

Actually, as far as I can ascertain, you're wrong, Goldie. It's confusing as heck, but the @replies settings are related to whether Twitter filters out messages from people who you already follow that are responses to other people you don't follow. It doesn't have anything to do with integrating the messages from people you don't follow who are replying to your Twitters.

In other words, let's say that I follow Amy and Tom, but not Leo. Amy responds in two Tweets to Tom and Leo: by default, I'll see Amy's Tweet to Tom because I follow both of them, but won't see her message to Leo because I don't follow him. Meanwhile, Leo replies to a message I sent. Do I see it?

No.

Posted by: Dave Taylor on January 25, 2008 7:18 AM

Before you leave a comment, a tip: If you're interested in blogging, you should sign up for my Blogsmart News so you can stay up to date on the latest insider tips and ideas for your Internet business and marketing efforts. Sign up right now and you'll get a free copy of my "Insider's Guide to Blogging" ebook too!