Twitter’s @Reply Stupidity

If you’re using Twitter’s “replies” feature, or the similar feature on many Twitter clients, you’re missing a lot of the responses you’re getting.

You see, Twitter has a pretty strange definition for what constitutes a reply. It is perfectly possible to type @username and not have Twitter realize that you’re talking to that person. If they’re checking on the Web site or a weak Twitter client, they might never see your message.

The “bug” is that Twitter only tracks replies if the message BEGINS with the @reply. So unless the “@” is the first character in the tweet and the username is the first one replied to, Twitter doesn’t see it as a reply.

This set up defies both the way we communicate as human beings and how people use Twitter. That, in turn, has led to some pretty inelegant solutions to get around the problem.

An Example Conversation

Let’s say I’m in a room talking with three other people. We have my wife, Crystal, her friend Liz and my neighbor Tony (why the four of us would be talking could be the subject of many “walked into a bar” jokes). The four of us are all talking at the same time but not necessarily to everyone in the group, we are just in each others presence.

At one point I grab Crystal and say “Crystal, what do you think of my shoes?”

That, in Twitter, would equal this: “@Crystal What do you think of my shoes?” This, in turn, works pretty well, Crystal gets it as an @reply and all works as planned.

But what if I want to ask the question to her and Liz: “Crystal and Liz, what do you think of my shoes?”

Translated into Twitter that would be “@Crystal @Liz What do you think of my shoes?”

This is where the problem comes in. Crystal gets the @reply but Liz doesn’t, even though the question was to both of them. However, as far as Twitter knows, I wasn’t asking Liz anything, but merely referencing her. This would be roughly the same as saying “Crystal, what do you think Liz thinks of my shoes?” which is not what I said at all.

So let’s change the question again, I’m asking Crystal and Liz again, but this time about Tony’s shoes. “Crystal and Liz, what do you think about Tony’s shoes?”

Translated into Twitter that would be “@Crystal @Liz What do you think about @Tony shoes?”

Once again, Crystal gets the @reply, Liz doesn’t, though the question was to her as well and @Tony doesn’t get it either, which is debatable as it wasn’t a question to him, though I think he might have a legitimate interest in the response.

Clearly this system isn’t working. Even when you have just four people talking the system breaks totally down. Never mind what happens when you have millions. There has to be a better way.

Referencing vs. Replying

The problem is simple, for Twitter, if a tweet begins with @username, then it is a reply. If it has the @username anywhere else, it merely references them. To view all of the actual replies you get, you have to either subscribed to a twitter search for @username or use a Twitter client such as Tweetdeck or Twhirl that has worked around that issue and reports all @ mentions as replies.

But even with this hack-ish solution, it is still a broken system, at least when compared to what Twitter thinks it should mean. It either all-on or all-off. Either I reply to everyone, even those that I just want to reference, or I only reply to the first person on the list. There needs to be a solution.

What we need is a way to actually distinguish between the people we are talking to and those we are talking about. Since we already have a hashtag system, why not use a variation of that to distinguish when we are talking about people?

The simplest solution would be to use #username to say when we are talking about someone. However, that will run into problems as there are many Twitter users with names similar to existing hashtags. So, if you had a pretty common username, it wouldn’t work.

Then we have two options, one would be to use another symbol, such as an “&” or “*”. The other would be to use the hash with the @ system. For example, #@username.

The former system would require some re-learning on the part of Twitter users and the latter one would eat up a precious character each time one wanted to do it.

But then comes the hard question. How often do we really reference someone without wanting them to see it? Most of the time it is when we are encouraging others to follow another person or contact them. Is it terrible that they would know about those conversations?

If we assume that, then the simplest solution is to go back to the beginning and just have Twitter acknowledge all uses of the @ symbol as an @reply and then everyone carry on as is. The worst that will happen is that some people will occasionally get replies that weren’t really to them, but about them, and that they probably wanted to see anyway.

Going back to my final example, “@Crystal @Liz What do you think about @Tony shoes?” I think it’s reasonable to say that Tony would be very interested in that tweet (depending on how much he cared about his shoes) and even though it wasn’t actually to him, he would want to see it. As for me, Crystal and Liz, I don’t think any of us should be offended that he did. Not unless we’re talking about him behind his back…

However, that’s what direct messages are for…

Bottom Line

If Twitter is to be our new method of online conversation, it isn’t going to become that by breaking the established rules of dialog. Twitter needs to find ways to adapt the way we talk natural to its 140 character world, not try to redefine everything.

This is something that would, theoretically, be a very simple fix for Twitter to implement and it remains unclear why they have failed to do so. As such, retweets, @replies to more than one person and incorrectly formatted @replies never reach their destination without some hacking.

It’s a simple fix, the question is whether Twitter will actually admit it was wrong in this area…