pleasefixthis – Climb to the Stars

[fr] Twitter cache maintenant les conversations partielles, ce que je trouve très dommage. C'était une porte ouverte pour découvrer des amis d'amis -- et en plus, l'implémentation actuelle nous prive d'une partie du vécu de nos amis, simplement parce qu'ils ne nous l'adressent pas.

I [noticed this morning](http://twitter.com/stephtara/statuses/69781842) that Twitter is hiding messages addressed (using @username) to people one is not following. You can still see them by looking at a friend’s page, but they don’t appear on one’s home page anymore.

Example: on [Faruk’s Twitter page](http://twitter.com/KuraFire), you can see many messages addressed to people I don’t follow, using [the @username syntax](http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=63).

If I look at my homepage, now, only the messages which are not addressed to a recognized username I’m not following (follow me there?) are visible in my home page:

[This twitter](http://twitter.com/KuraFire/statuses/69937782), for example, is invisible on my home page. I only get [this unaddressed one](http://twitter.com/KuraFire/statuses/69906382).

This means that we do not see what is commonly called “partial conversations” — ie, conversations the people you are following are having with people that they are following but you are not. While some people will rejoice, because they found that annoying, I find that it’s a damn shame. And I’m [not](http://twitter.com/stephtara/statuses/69951982) [alone](http://twitter.com/sheilaellen/statuses/69948382).

Why do I think it’s such a shame? Well, yes, twitter is mainly for keeping in touch with people you already know. But it’s also a really great place to get to know the friends of your friends — and partial conversations are the doorway to this. Partial conversations have drawn me to people I didn’t otherwise know on Twitter, because I’ve found them involved in conversations with a friend of mine, or even, a few friends of mine. Curiosity, went to check on them, ended up adding them.

With the current implementation, this would never have happened.

And even if you don’t think meeting knew people is interesting — there are many times when I have discovered that an existing friend of mine had finally got a Twitter account only because I caught a partial conversation between him and somebody else.

So, please, Twitter: give us back our partial conversations. Make it an option to hide them if some people really hate them. But don’t shut me out of what’s going on in my friends’ lives just because they happen to be addressing it to somebody I don’t (yet) know.

**Update, July 25, 2007**

Another reason why this is broken: I never saw [this twitter](http://twitter.com/KuraFire/statuses/131380652), though it was addressed to me (too), because I don’t follow [neilford](http://twitter.com/neilford).

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