Twitter Replies Change Hints at Capacity Issues

Twitter has been abuzz today with complaints over the removal of a piece of replies functionality. Complaints have been so numerous that #fixreplies has been the top trending term on Twitter most of the day.

Well, the Twitter bigwigs have listened – but not backed out the change as many were hoping. According to the official Twitter blog:

We’re hearing your feedback and reading through it all. One of the strongest signals is that folks were using this setting to discover and follow new and interesting accounts—this is something we absolutely want to support. Our product, design, user experience, and technical teams have started brainstorming a way to surface a new, scalable way to address this need.

The blog entry also mentions “serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt”, which explains why the change isn’t being rolled back. Combined with the use of the word “scalable” this suggests capacity problems – I’d guess there was a table somewhere growing exponentially as the user base increased.

Growing pains are understandable with any service and Twitter are to be congratulated for listening to and acknowledging the complaints of users. However the fact remains they needn’t have got themselves in this mess in the first place. Suddenly removing a feature without prior warning or consultation is a very, very bad idea especially with a vocal user community such as Twitter.

Twitter reckons that only 2% of users actually made use of this feature anyway, but almost by definition they’d have been the most active Twitterers with the most contacts. Annoying such a group is a recipe for PR disaster in any field, especially social media.

Putting aside the technical issues this remains a massive PR fail by a company that really should know better. It’s too early to tell whether their swift “we’re listening” response will be enough to heal the self-inflicted wound.