On August 16th Twitter announced that the vestigal feature in the developer API.
Here’s some of the info.:
“I’m happy to announce a minor change to the API that should have a major impact on the Twitter community. The /statuses/update method now takes an optional parameter: in_reply_to_status_id. As you might guess, this allows API clients to specify which status a status to be posted is in reply to, rather than our system assuming that it’s in reply to the last message posted by the user specified by “@username”.
If your client posts statuses, please consider making use of this feature. By convention, we’d like to continue to use “@username” at the beginning of messages that are replies, but specifying the in_reply_to_status_id parameter will override the guess about the in_reply_to_status_id attribute that our system makes. Yes, this does mean that you could post a message that appears to be a reply to Alice while it’s actually a reply to Bob; that’s fine, as I’m sure there’s a use case for it out there.”
Many people have been blogging about this and decided that it might completely wipe out @username. It is one of the most loved things because it allows you to show up on someone else’s twitter page if you respond to their post.
Threaded conversations will make it difficult to use twitter for marketing. If you ask me, I believe the same thing. For a lot of bloggers we use this to market our blog. This allows people to see that someone is responding to a post we made on twitter and then their followers can see that and click on your username to see more about you. With that gone twitter becomes useless to me.
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The majority of Twitter users are set to the default option for @ replies, which shows them only @replies directed at someone they’re already following. For most users, this will have no effect on which messages they see.
In the current system, if you post a blog post and Twitter about it, and then I send an @reply to you about it, only those who are following both of us will see the @ reply anyway. Taking the @ out of the equation won’t change make anything different there.
However, removing the @ reply could potentially bring more people to you. If a message doesn’t begin with the @, Twitter will send it to everyone following that user. For example, if I compose a tweet to say “I just read @onlinetreason’s latest blog post,” everyone will see that, whether they’re following you or not.
It’s unclear from Twitter’s announcement if the API-driven replies will function the same as the @ replies. In other words, it doesn’t indicate if a client-specified reply will be picked up by everyone or just those who are following both parties. If the beginning @ remains as the determining factor, then this addition to the API is actually a huge benefit.
Twhirl and other popular clients indicate under each status the client and context of a post. Twhirl does this by adding a line such as “onlinetreason about 25m ago via Twitter Tools in reply to davehuston.” Since the API now allows for that sort of reply without the @, it’s possible then that others who are not following me already might see your post and see below that it was in reply to me.
And if it continues to function as it does now with @replies, then we’ve neither gained nor lost audience, as very few Twitter users set themselves to follow status updates sent to those they’re not following.
I understand what you’re saying but it is scaring a lot of bloggers because a lot of people think that they are trying to get rid of the @username. They posted about this without really even trying to get people to read about it. People just happened to come across it.
I suppose that I am a little bit confused by this. I use Twitter, and I still see people using @username. As far as I know, this hasn’t been wiped out. Or am I missing something?
Personally I am not a big fan of twitter. It is a lot of work and truthfully there is too much content to keep up on. I really can’t be bothered ‘micro-posting’ every 20 minutes. However, if this really is a way you can make lots of money I will look into it. But for now I look forward to the death of twitter so I don’t have to worry about it
I think Twitter is a really good thing for all of us bloggers. It is always good to make as many relationships as possible because if they are Internet users they can help you out on many different social media levels. A lot of bloggers that are making it my money had used with her to their advantage.