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.

A prettier way to see WWDC updates from Twitter is Twistori/#wwdc, which seems to be running fine.

UPDATE: Perhaps I spoke too soon; Twitter has been having a few troubles; but, it’s back now, so… kudos to Twitter, again.

Wait… replies? Yes. I guess they’re optional.

That said, it is working now, and twitter seems to be fine, so far.

I’m not sure yet if I will be using this much; I rarely want to post the same thing to every site I use… and FriendFeed’s aggregation of other sites also makes this a great way to have a lot of duplicates in some areas. But for some, it may be useful.

What do you think of this sort of thing?

I’d echo yes, this seems like a good idea.

So far, my feeling is still that Twitter’s core user base will not abandon ship while they are fixing their architecture and in other ways resolving their issues. A bad sign for Twitter is that I’m increasingly seeing people use a different service as “their new Twitter” (see Leo Laporte’s first comment in this FriendFeed discussion). However, a stable, robust Twitter could still win these people back, I think.

What I’m missing is the interaction… I can see any and all updates in status people have made, things they’ve written… but to actually comment on or in any way respond to any given item, I need to go to another site.

Having said that; I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I’m reminded of Dave Winer’s statement that the best way to have a site that people want to go to is to send them away:

People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.

So maybe FriendBinder’s static display of updates is not such a bad idea. I guess time will tell. As it is, between the bacn (:sigh, yes I’m actually using the term) and sites like FriendBinder, I’m finding that I don’t actually ever need to visit Facebook at all, unless I actually need to respond to something there that I can’t do from anywhere else. To me, that is valuable.

I’d welcome this feature; I predict, however, that we’re going to hear a chorus asking why work on a new feature, given issues the service is already having?

Then again, I wonder if people spending time only in groups, in smaller subsets of followers/followees, might actually lessen the load on the server?

I’m telling you, this blog writes itself.