Alone and Unobserved

David Pogue has written another Twitter post for the NY Times (this one in the actual paper, I believe, not on his blog) and, while this article is much, much, MUCH better than the last in terms of style, structure and content (yay for editors!), there’s one thing bugging me: he still doesn’t seem to understand the Twitter @reply. Here’s what he said:

IF YOU’RE CONFUSED ABOUT REPLYING, YOU’RE NOT ALONE If you reply to one of my tweets . . . I can reply as another public tweet, but of course nobody but you will have any idea what I’m talking about. (“@puppydog: Maybe in Montana!!! LOL”).

This is just as misleading as it was when he said it in his first post. @Replies are not like other public tweets, in the sense that you can turn them off. If you are tired of seeing one-half of conversations you aren’t part of, here are the steps for filtering them out of your Twitter feed (as of February 12, 2009, at least):

1. Log in to your Twitter account at twitter.com.
2. Click on the ‘Settings’ link in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
3. Click on the ‘Notices’ tab.
4. Change ‘@ Replies’ to “Show me: @ replies of the people I’m following” or “Show me: no @ replies.”
5. Click the ‘Save’ button.

That’s it. You’ll no longer see one-sided conversations that don’t make any sense.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Conversations are only really one-sided if one of the people involved has protected their updates (which is yet another reason why you shouldn’t protect your own!), because you can always click through to the third person’s tweet and read what your friend was replying to. Maybe you’ll be be drawn into the conversation and end up following that person, too! But if you never see the conversations that go on, you can never join them or follow the people who are having them. You lose out on a lot of the Twitter experience that way.

If you still have questions about @replies and filtering them out of your Twitter feed, here are two Twitter help pages that explain everything in even more detail:

Two days ago I posted an entry entitled “How to Twitter Like a Pro, or at Least Better than @davidpogue,” in response to an article David Pogue of the NY Times had posted on his own blog. It’s fair to say that I was somewhat less than kind, calling Mr. Pogue “eager and clueless” and the article “wrong-headed,” “misinformed” and “a nice try that unfortunately failed.” It seemed like a good idea at the time, but given what followed, perhaps it was impolitic.

Yesterday David Pogue apparently found my post and read it, an eventuality I had somehow not envisioned. (I have no illusions about my blog being high profile—but I should have remembered The Golden Rule of Blogging.) And naturally, given the subject matter, he Twittered it and asked his thousands of followers what they thought.

Nine hours ago, my Twitter feed and blog comments suddenly caught fire. People were following me left and right, and comment after comment poured in. My blog stats (which I am not ashamed to say are usually abysmal) suddenly shot through the roof. My name and my blog post were being bandied about across the Twitterverse, occasionally in fairly negative terms. My honor was being impugned! A reply seems necessary.

I would like to say that I don’t have anything against Mr. Pogue, and I really hope I didn’t come off like another of those Twitter Nazis who chided him for being a noob or asking noob questions. From looking at his feed, it seems like he’s really getting the hang of Twittering, and by posting about it on his blog he has brought it to the attention of many readers, and recalled it to the memory of more who might have previously dismissed it. So that’s great. I have no argument with that.

I do have a few problems with his article, and they all boil down to one thing: the post needed a thorough editing job. The style and tone were inconsistent, and the structure fought with his message in almost every paragraph, to the point that I didn’t know if he liked, loathed or loved Twitter until the last two paragraphs. I firmly believe that if the post had been more coherently written, he wouldn’t have gotten comments like this one or this one, or from so many people who thought they were agreeing with him when they derided Twitter. I hold professional writers like Mr. Pogue to a higher standard than that, even in blog posts.

In the end, I guess it’s not so much David Pogue’s Twittering philosophy I disagree with as with his blogging style? Maybe I should go subscribe to his blog RSS feed and find out.