What You Missed on Twitter is a little program that answers the #fixreplies problem for all those (according to Twitter less than 3% – although that IMHO is a poor statistic) that liked seeing “all@replies”. If you are following a large number of users then it can take awhile to load. From my perspective this is the sharing that makes twitter interesting and conversational. Even on this simple test my data stream is now over 1000 tweets down. No wonder I can see it and feel it. It’s a simply loss of ambient intimacy. I’m not sure any of these examples would have engaged me to follow another and yet they also serve another purpose. They are “live” tweeters in a conversational mode. The tweets that twitter has left in… are more asynchronous in nature. By definition Twitter is less real-time today. That’s going to cost them $’s in the long run. Here’s an example of the output.
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Stuart, thanks for posting about the “What You Missed” hack.
You’re right that finding new people to follow is only one of the ways these (now missing) Tweets matter. They also tell us what our friends are interested in, keeping us more connected with them.
A lot of people are focusing on the “who” aspect of it, where these tweets tell us who our friends are talking to. That’s certainly part of it, but to me, equally important is the “what” – these tweets tell me the topics that are interesting enough to my friends to compel them to go the effort to craft a reply – that says a lot.
Another thing a lot of people seem to be confused about regarding this #fixreplies issue is what tweets are affected. Using the Twitter website for illustration purposes, this is not about the tweets that would appear on the “mentions” sub-page (used to be “replies” sub-page), but tweets that would have been on your “home” page.
In other words, it’s not about “replies” that you’re now missing. It’s about tweets by people you’re following that you’re now missing.
David, great comments and it’s important we keep reinforcing that these are tweets that don’t find their way into the “flow” and what’s on your home page. If we add in the why and where… it becomes even more interesting. We should perhaps move our experiments to another platform?
You know, I’m starting to think the “What I missed” tweets are the MOST interesting in the Twitter stream – not vice versa.
In terms of moving our “experiments” – what alternative do you suggest?
You know, I’m starting to think the “What I missed” tweets are the MOST interesting in the Twitter stream – not vice versa.
In a sense, like reading the comments on blogs that you frequent, or where one is part of the community, after you’ve been blogging for years ? Often the nuggets, and the means of doing some useful sense-making, are for me, found in the comments section as much or more so than in the initial blog post(s).
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