[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.
[en]
I noticed this morning 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, you can see many messages addressed to people I don’t follow, using the @username syntax.
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, for example, is invisible on my home page. I only get this unaddressed one.
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 alone.
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, though it was addressed to me (too), because I don’t follow neilford.
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How Will CoComment Change Our Commenting Habits?
I was really excited to be able to talk about coComment yesterday Saturday night, and I really think it’s a great service, but I never thought it would pick up as fast as it did. As I heard Robert saying at LIFT, the blogosphere is not about how many people read you, but about who does, and how things scale and can get out of hand once the masses get hold of them.
CoComment is already changing the way I participate in comments (conversations!) on other blogs. I feel more connected. I feel like it makes more sense to leave a comment on a blog I scarcely visit, because it’s not a message in a bottle anymore: I have an easy way to get back to it. CoComment makes my activity on other blogs visible, so it encourages me to be active (yeah, that’s how I am! I like the spotlights, didn’t they tell you?) and maybe more conversational.
On the other hand, this is what I see coming: more popularity for popular blogs or posts or commenters (coComment will amplify the feedback loop effect for comments). Easy celeb’ stalking. Maybe more self-consciousness about “where I comment” and “what I comment”? Comments by top commenters will have a different weight on your blog, and different consequences, because they’ll get a different visibility. A-lister X’s comment on a lowly blog may have gone unnoticed until now, but if they use coComment, it won’t anymore. Will we start signing out of coComment to retain privacy over a certain amounts of comments we make, and that we don’t want in the public eye?
I’m really happy to see coComment gaining so much popularity. I’m just a bit worried. Is this too much success/visibility to soon? I’ve seen people (gently) bitching around already about what a shame it was that coComment did not support all blog platforms, or that it only tracked comments by coCommenters. Laurent says he’s pushing to open it up on Monday night, but I wonder: is it really a good idea? What are the risks involved? What has the most potential for damage: frustrating people because they can’t yet be “part of it”, or not being able to manage the scaling, user feedback, and user expectations for a public service?
I know I’m a worry-bug, and Laurent and Nicolas are smart and know the insides of the service much better than I do — so I’ll just go and prepare my stuff for school and worry about useful things for my life just now (like, what am I going to teach this morning). All the same, guys: “Soyez prudents!”
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