Big time #twitterfail

All right, I haven't been this pissed off in a while. Twitter just made an update supposedly in our best interest to stop displaying half conversations. In a nutshell, if someone you're following is replying to someone you're NOT following, they're doing you the favor of not displaying it to you. See, they claim this is just too confusing, and we wouldn't want that.

Thing is, they used to have an option for this. You could choose if whether you wanted to see these half-conversations. By default it was turned on. So now, in order to avoid confusing us simple folk, they've REMOVED THE OPTION COMPLETELY. No, they didn't change they default. They just removed it. They didn't want to worry our pretty little heads with complex things like options. Nope, just remove the option and stick to one thing.

Problem is, people wanted this. I know I sure as hell did. Some are pissed off about how it'll ruin #followfriday. Reality is, I'm not sure that's true. It only blocks the messages that begin with an @mention so as long as you start with #followfriday or something you're covered. RTs aren't affected, either. It's just replies. Why is this a big deal? Well, I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds his most interesting conversations and most fascinating follows through those very half-conversations they're sure are confusing us. I constantly see a conversation mid-stream, check out the person being replied to, jump in, and soon enough I'm engaged for several hours. I end up gaining one or more interesting people to follow, and I get several new followers from people watching the conversation unfold.

Does Twitter really want to destroy this ability to constantly grow and expand the communities and networking this option provided? What's the goal, here? Are they just trying to cut bandwidth any way they can at the expense of one of the things that made us even want to use their service to begin with? If so, I foresee an even bigger drop in bandwidth as people start giving up altogether. It's that very expanding universe that sucks me in. A closed-off one like what they've just created can only serve to stifle my interest. They'd better catch on fast before the damage is too great.