The reaction was swift and merciless last night. “Retweet this if you disagree with Twitter‘s decision to hide replies to people you don’t follow #fixreplies.” That message has been going out ever since, now that users have discovered that Twitter has blocked the ability for them to see responses from people that don’t already follow them.
The irony is that folks will just continue to migrate to third party platforms like Tweetdeck that give them the functionality that Twitter lacks, which will begin to dilute the number of folks who log into Twitter’s actual site on a daily basis. My theory on this is that more and more companies like Comcast are using Twitter as a customer service interface and the Twitter folks see this as an area they could charge for within premium corporate accounts.
If so, they’d be wise to read Reprise Media Managing Partner Peter Hershberg’s post in Ad Age today, where he talks about the early days of search engine evolution and the similarities to where social media sites are today. In the post Pete talks about the prevailing beliefs when he was at Ask.com and at other engines like Google at the turn of the century:
The belief (and reality) was that Wall Street valued B-to-B revenue potential more highly than consumer revenue potential, so that side of the company received the bulk of the resources. Ask went so far as to position the consumer site as a showcase for the corporate technology. Some execs simply didn’t think there would ever be a business there because the rev opportunity wasn’t obvious.
Fast forward to modern times and we find Google designer Doug Bowman jumping ship due to their data-centric culture. It’s important to note that the data that he felt constrained by was customer and consumer research data. Google is so focused on the user experience that they are very careful about what kinds of changes they make, knowing that this directly drives their revenue. It’s a far cry from corporate search accounts.
The irony is that Bowman landed at Twitter, which seems to have taken two steps back for the one step forward that was their recent integration of search for all users.
To be fair, I don’t believe that users necessarily know what they want until they’ve experienced it, but Twitter and other social media sites tread into dangerous waters when them seem to make changes arbitrarily and fail to understand what many users like about the experience the site offers.
In the case of Twitter, for many people it’s meeting and conversing with people who have similar interests and stimulating things to say, whether you already follow them or not.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
