Twitter – Anti social media?

If you are a regular Twitter user, you will already know about the massive screw-up that has happened over the past 24 hours.

Twitter & the #fixreplies mistake

For some reason, Twitter’s team have decided to remove one of the most important ‘community’ elements of their service.  They have blocked your ability to see any tweets, sent by people you follow – UNLESS those tweets are sent to someone you already follow.

For example: If you don’t follow me @thetechnewsblog – and a friend of yours on Twitter sends me an interesting message, you won’t see it! You will only see the tweets they send to you or those they send that are not directed at anyone.

This dumb move by Twitter, makes it far harder for you to find new, interesting people. It will stunt the growth of Twitter and the communities of those, who use Twitter.

This move is just plain stupid and Twitter will definitely climb down.

Twitter anti-social media

Twitter is intended to be a social media service; a place to communicate with people and share ideas.  However, it seems Twitter’s staff are far better at providing a social media service, than they are at using one.

As someone who has never had a tech support email returned by Twitter or even had @ev or @biz respond to a tweet, I am very aware of the fact that Twitter’s founders prefer to broadcast, rather than communicate.

Arrogance?

Twitter’s decision to remove this feature, rather than give users the option to either use it or disable it, has been seen by many as indicative of the arrogance that Twitter’s team are displaying, since becoming media stars.

Respected tech broadcaster Leo Laporte, recently summed up what many of us have been thinking. He commented on his TWiT podcast, about the change in the news coming out of Twitter’s HQ.  These days, the news from Twitter’s founders is increasingly about the stars and celebrities they are meeting – and less about their service or their users.

Twitter is still the hottest place on the Internet right now. This screw up and the arrogance that led to it, will not see any appreciable drop in user numbers.

However, with Twitter’s very poor user retention rate (over 60% of new users leave within a month), I wonder how long it will be before they are forced to listen to their community and embrace social media?  If they had asked users what they wanted from the service, this whole mess would never have happened.