This Twitter Thing

[Hailey Knight]

First of all:



So now with my feelings established, I'm looking at this thing and I don't understand it. If I'm looking at Person A's Twitter, and they have posted a message @Person B, and then another to Person B clearly as a response, I apparently have to go to Person B's Twitter to see the other side of the conversation and just have to match up the times? Or is there a way to follow the thread like in a forum? I can see someone's messages to others, but not messages to that someone.

Or can I?

 

[strawman]

Pretty much. If you don't follow all the people involved in a conversation then it'll be hard to follow a conversation. I don't follow people that spend most of their time in twitter conversations, though. Generally I think of twitter as a broadcast medium and I follow people who post things I may want to know about.

For instance, there are lots of people who deal with electronics and computers, and so following them you get a constant stream of interesting information and news about that subject - sort of like the awesome videos thread, or funny pictures thread.

If you pick a few topics you're interested in, you'll find people who talk about them a lot of twitter, and you may find websites, videos, etc that you wouldn't have otherwise seen.

 

[Hailey Knight]

I understand that, but I'm not really interested in getting into Twitter so much as there are people who I want to hear what they have to say, and when they have conversations, it'd be nice to be able to follow them. It's like on here--I read way more than I write; I'm following conversations.

Ah well. Fail whale, Twitter. Fail whale.

 

[figmentPez]

No, the real fail is Twitter's explanations why they hide @mentions of people you're not following. They think it would be confusing to people to even have the option in their preferences. There are even a lot of people who have no idea this happens, and intentionally try to tweet to everyone about a person, but it's never seen by their followers because they didn't format correctly. (Example: "@yournamehere is in the paper today" gets only seen by people also following @yournamehere but "Guess what? @yournamehere is in the paper." gets seen by everyone. Stupid! Does using dedicated software like Tweetdeck fix this problem and allow people to see all the tweets of someone they're following?

The "new" Twitter, that you have to sign-in to test, makes it a little easier to see what message a reply is in response to, though. It won't help you follow a chain of messages back, or figure out what a reply is to if the person didn't use the "reply" button, but it is better than the current system.

 

[Rovewin]

Yeah I had been wondering the same thing. So far I have just been going to the main twitter page and searching for "persons twitter name" to try and follow the twitter conversations which works decently if they have a unique type name

 

[figmentPez]

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. Even if you're using the default Twitter interface, there should be a "in reply to" link below a reply tweet that's a link to the tweet it's replying to. (Though that link won't be there if they just make a new @mention, instead of clicking "reply")

 

[drifter]

The "new" Twitter, that you have to sign-in to test, makes it a little easier to see what message a reply is in response to, though. It won't help you follow a chain of messages back, or figure out what a reply is to if the person didn't use the "reply" button, but it is better than the current system.

Oh, I never noticed that before. I basically stopped trying to follow conversations because it was such a pain in the ass. That actually seems to work pretty well.

 

[North_Ranger]

Twitter, Myspace, Facebook... can't give a flying fork about any of them.

 

[strawman]

You should try the new aerodynamic forks.

 

[linglingface]

I only started a Twitter to follow celebs and enter contests.

 

[Gusto]

I started using Twitter because some friends wanted me to and I was curious how many people would give a shit to follow me.

 

[figmentPez]

That's what puzzles me. I have followers on Twitter, and I can't figure out why. They're not real life friends. I never announced here that I have a Twitter feed, but there are still a handful of people following me. (There are also a couple dozen spambots, but I'm not counting those. Just the accounts that appear to be real people.) The only one I can fathom is Impulsedriven (Stardock's online store). I'm guessing they follow anyone who follows them. The rest, I have no clue.

 

[Fun Size]

Even stranger to me is when some company/online entity starts following you because you randomly mention them. I have Pandora and Newgrounds currently following my feed, which consists of (you'll never guess it) me making random smart ass remarks.