Lately I’ve noticed more and more people putting a “.” before they type a reply to someone in Twitter’s public time line. It’s a small but smart work around for the problem created by Twitter decision to decrease the noise in the system by hiding any message someone sends via the “@[name]” from any of their followers who are not following that specific person. A lot of people were ticked off when Twitter decided to go that route because of the residual value and increased serendipity allowed by everyone seeing who you were talking to. Many people actually like that type of noise because it surfaces the social graph (i.e. the fact that you can see who someone talks to, regardless of the conversational content, is often valuable.) So people are starting to sacrifice just 1 character of their 140 limit to effectively make their conversations public. Simple, smart fix. Right on.
It just goes to show you, when one person finds a smart work-around for a common problem and uses it in public, that idea will propagate across the network as it is adopted by more and more people…until it becomes part of the culture.
I have noticed that appearing in my timeline but I have 2 issues with it. 1- I have been conditioned by Twitter now to not see the replies and so when I see that convention I think “oh this person thinks their reply is very important”, usually it isn't so it annoys me.
2- I can't follow the conversation, when they use that format it breaks the link saying what it's replying to which ibfeel isvavreally bad use of Twitter, thevreply becomes worthless unless I understand the context.
That's an interesting take. I never looked at it like that (re: #1). I do it sometimes…it never occurred to me that I might have been annoying anyone else out there with self-importance, but I definitely see your side of it. And yeah…re: #2, see my comment above to Mark. Twitter still doesn't do conversations well (and probably never will).
Once again the Twitter community finds a way to use the platform to their advantage, but it does make for an uneven experience when some people use it while others don't. It can be hard to follow the thread of conversation.
I agree. Twitter just wasnt built for conversations, but it's interesting to see people still finding work-arounds that spread. If someone comes up with a Twitter-like platform that solves the conversational issues Twitter has, I'll be curious to see how people react. It's still far from a perfect system, and as history goes, social platforms on the web have a habit of peaking and then disappearing when someone comes up with better solutions for people's needs.