Twitter’s Response to #fixreplies: We Can’t

"We can't" has got to be a blatant lie. It worked two days ago.<p>Let's say they changed the architecture so that @replies go to a dedicated queue, and not to the public timeline queue. The solution is simple, then... make two copies when posting, one for each destination. But I don't think this is the issue, since supposedly mutual followers will see the @reply in your public timeline. So I really don't get it.<p>Twitter--. They are either incompetent, or are lying.

It looks like they announced they will be making a concession to bring back at least some of the old behavior:<p><a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html</a><p>The jist: they're bringing back the old behavior only when the message starts with @username (and hasn't been created clicking the reply icon).<p>It sounds like they made a technical change which trumps the actual message content with a piece of reply-to metadata, which is either explicitly included by the client or parsed by their infrastructure.<p>Previously I believe it was "dumb" and didn't examine anything, and it was up to the client to filter based on the content of the message when it came to showing half-conversations.

I'm confused. We'll no longer see @replies from people we don't follow? If so, that's awful.<p>Good thing Twitter bought Summize, as it's quickly becoming the most useful part of Twitter. Search "to:username" gives you this exact functionality.

I know I probably shouldn't do this, but... the basic problem with Twitter, as it relates to discussions, is it's severe restriction on num