Ok, so I had heard the way it works before, but it is somewhat confusing when you try to put it in to a practical situation and/or try to explain it (except the blog I found does a great job). And so I “lost” track of how it was working. And whenever I looked for an explanation I would get a search result that brought up information from 2008 and it was 2009 that the change was made.
I was further confused by a comment on my previous post that stated I had control over what replies I could see. So I searched smarter. I actually included the year in my search terms—duh!
So I found the some blogs that that helped explain things (click on the links below to go to each blog):
This first one is Twitter’s blog.
It explains that you only see @ replies (if it is the first “word” in the tweet) if you are following both the people in the conversation. It also tells us what we want and don’t want. It states that seeing a “one-sided” conversation is “undesirable”.
So this is said to cut down on the “confusion” and the “chatter” of Twitter. But for some of us, what is really does is cut down on one of the things that was so great about Twitter and that was meeting new people with ease and following people that you might actually have an interest in following. The way it used, to be you could see the conversation or part of it and then if you were really interested you could look at the profiles and possibly decide to follow that person.
This blog from Tech Crunch does a great job of explaining the way it is.
The opinion expressed is that of Twitter taking the choice from its users. We used to have a choice as to what replies we saw, but now Twitter has decided what we want.
And DownloadSquad says that Twitter is going to change it eventually.*
So, as I originally suggested: type words before you @ so that it can be seen by your followers no matter if they are following the other person or not.
I do this because most of the people I am following are business people. And a lot of them are very kind and they share their expertise and kindness generously. So I want to broadcast them. I want to help them and their business, I want to share their kindness, and their expertise and make all of it viral. Bugs me that twitter makes it difficult for me to do that. Bugs me that Twitter decided that I think what is desirable.
As you can see by the links I have included in this blog, there are a lot of blogs out there that talk about Twitter. I mainly was writing this blog to help a few of my new Nia friends who are just starting to realize that Twitter is a great way to get the word out about Nia. So if we are using Twitter properly that helps us spread our love of Nia.
You are invited and encouraged to kindly comment. Keep in mind that I am not claiming to be an “expert” I am just sharing some information that I believe to be true and sharing my opinions. Thank you so much for taking the time to read it.
*06.06.20
This link was not working last time I check. But I would imagine Twitter has changed a lot since 2009.
Terre Pruitt's Blog 