As is no doubt well covered, Twitter has been without the “replies” feature for some time tonight.
So, now what? I realized within a few minutes that the main reason I spend any time on Twitter is to check the replies tab. Yes, I push stuff out there, everyone does; but that’s only part of the point.
Twitter was conceived as a sort of “presence” service. I’m doing this. I’m watching that. I’m at home, work, I’m sleeping, I’m sick/tired/well/happy/bored/confused/apathetic. I don’t think that it’s difficult to argue, however, that Twitter became a lot more than that, and that the real attraction of Twitter is the conversation (or, at least, the pseudo-conversation).
I’d feel comfortable saying that the @ replies are what made Twitter avoid being merely a curiousity, and turned it to a killer app.
The API was important, yes. That opened Twitter up to all sorts of other things; but without @ replies, I don’t think there’d be nearly enough going on to attract the same attention, and an API for a mere presence notifier is not very compelling.
Compare Facebook’s status/presence feature. That’s all it is. You can’t reply or say “Oh cool” or “Aw nuts” if someone is saying something cool/interesting in their Facebook status. It’s just there. Moderately interesting, but not insanely great.
All that to say; this is a pretty dangerous feature to turn off, I think. If it starts to get repeated, if we start to feel that we can’t really rely on being able to use Twitter replies…. I’m pretty sure that would be the tipping point for users to start seriously looking at the various “alternative Twitters” out there.
As I say this, I hope that won’t really happen. I want Twitter to stick around. I think Twitter’s pilots must realize the importance of the @ feature to Twitter’s success, and hopefully we can be reasonably sure that this won’t become a regular outage. Hopefully.