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Now We Can Rig Up Twitter “Groups”!

Twitter’s recent change to their reply function means we can use the site in a whole new way.

Let’s make lemonade out of lemons, folks. Some people are upset that Twitter has changed their @reply functionality such that you can no longer see replies to people you don’t follow (from people you do follow). One argument for this function is that it helps you learn about new things and new people through your friends. One argument against is that you end up seeing fragmented half-conversations. One major argument against is this one from the Twitter blog: “The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.”

Regardless of which side of the fence that you’re on, you can now use Twitter in a whole new way. We can now rig up “groups” through twitter accounts. For example, I’ve been wanting to tweet to my foodie friends about different foods and flavor combos I’ve been eating — but without spamming my whole list every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I could use a hashtag so that other friends could play too, but we’d still be overloading the twitterstreams of our non-foodie friends who could care less. With the new @reply setup, I could register @well_fed (just did) and reply to it whenever I want to describe my food. And any friends who wanted to do the same could also follow @well_fed so we could see each other’s food tweets.

You could do this for any topic. Photography (yes please), cars, any subgroup. And if you think about it, Twitter would have to do something like this eventually. And I’m sure they’ve thought about it. Think about Flickr: They’ve done a beautiful job of creating a site where people of every imaginable subculture can co-exist (through groups, tags, etc.). Twitter is big enough that they have to do something to let people be people — and different kinds of people. They could create a more sophisticated version of this in the future, but until then we can play, experiment, adapt.

So why not? Let’s adapt! Spread the twitter word and use the hashtag #replygroups to do so.

Source: spaceminer