notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Twitter Style and Privacy

@madmw asks in a comment on Daniel Jalkut’s sensible (if verging on obvious) guide to Twitter style:

What about people protecting their tweets? Protect from who? Don’t they use twitter search?

My Twitter account is private, and so are those of many people I follow, so I thought I’d make some suggestions as to why I’m private, and answer the other two questions.

When I set up my account in November 2006, it was far from clear how Twitter was going to be used, but I thought of it more as IM than blogging. For the first year and a half of using the service, that privacy gave me the freedom to do some of the things Jalkut rightly suggests public users don’t do: make posts that were filled with swears, heated, political, or otherwise offensive. It also allowed me to vent about work. (Past tense there: I moved to a job where I had less need to, and also where pretty much every co-worker and I were mutual followers. That’s probably going to be the case for any job I actually want from now onwards, too.)

So, who am I protecting myself from? My future professional self, really. Early in the current UK election campaign, a candidate with some rather ill-judged postings was removed by his party. I don’t think I’ve said anything quite as stupid as that, but I quite like having more freedom to do so than those whose timelines are public, and I really don’t want to have to go back and purge the “old me”.

Does privacy carry a downside? Of course. As you note, searches don’t find private posts, so even if I wanted to contribute to a conference’s notes via a hashtag, I can’t. (The bonus side of this is I hate the aesthetics of hashtags, so it’s not a great loss.) Many third-party tools, even now OAuth is deployed, don’t work on private accounts. For me, the most noticeable problem is that the methods described for making sure people know you’re talking about them - acknowledgements, mentions and replies - don’t work if the person they’re directed at isn’t following you. Still, I’d use the first two anyway - people who follow me deserve to know where thing come from.

(Are there any etiquette recommendations for interacting with private users? The main one is to be mindful when quoting them. Twitter doesn’t allow private posts to be retweeted, although of course you can do so organically (to use Jalkut’s term); think about whether, if you’d written the post, you’d want it public, and if not, ask permission first. Otherwise, there’s nothing really I can think of.)

I doubt there’s much in the last year or so I’d be ashamed to have made public. Nonetheless, if only for that first, grumpy, year of posts, I keep my timeline private, and I’m glad I have the option, even if a vanishingly tiny percentage of users share my opinion.

Twitter, @replies and in_reply_to

benw:

Existing conversation trackers don’t work with this. The @@ replies get left out of threading tools. That’s a shame, but that’s the reality of new behaviour. It takes time to be recognised and supported. That as much as anything is why I’ve documented @@ here, as a reference and explanation for you to use as you advocate the practice, and to encourage everyone to settle on the @@ syntax in preference to the many that currently circulate.

There’s a reason that conversation trackers don’t get @@replies, but it’s quite longwinded to explain. However, since Ben has a fairly longwinded explanatory section to his post, and because I’ve wanted to get this down anyway, what the hell; let’s go with it.

Once upon a time Ev invented Twitter. And people saw it was good, and started using it, and as Ben says, came up with what became formalised as a way of replying to a named user: @replies. (I’d love to know where that convention started, by the way. Presumably some web forums, but which, and when? Not that anyone is likely to care enough to dig through terabytes of text to establish it. Anyway.)

And Twitter saw that their users were doing this, and that it might be useful to make it clever, so they started marking up @user with links to twitter.com/user. Furthermore, they came up with a heuristic: if a post started @user (or, in Perlish,

if $post =~ m/^\@user/

except Twitter’s front end is in Ruby, but it’d be similar) then you’d assume that the person was replying to user’s latest post.

All well and good, except… when it wasn’t true. So, some time last year (again, I don’t care to trawl; someone else might) Twitter added the “swoosh” link to the web interface. Clicking this didn’t just populate the post field with @user at the front: it set a bit of metadata saying “this post I want to create is an reply to this exact post ID here”. Technically, and unsurprisingly, this is the in_reply_to field.

There’s rules attached to this, both from the front end and from third-party clients via the API, though. For the in_reply_to argument to be honoured, the post must start with the @user the in_reply_to post is by. In fact, it has to match the regular expression above. Add a space? Add the letters “RT” or the recycle symbol? No in_reply_to metadata for you, buddy.

It also means that if you come to see a post that you want to reply to and just put @user without using the swoosh, or your client has a brainfart and drops the in_reply_to argument, your post also lacks the in_reply_to metadata. The upshot? Anyone coming along more than, say, a day later to your post has no idea which of @user’s posts you’re actually responding to. If you’re lucky it’ll be clear. If not, well, tough. “This was the previous behavior and was changed because of user complaints over false positives.” WONTFIX.

So, what have we learnt?

• in_reply_to is a relatively late change to Twitter
• in_reply_to is only available if you start your post @user
• in_reply_to is reliant on the user and client explicitly responding to a post
• in_reply_to is absent for retweets, @@replies, and the like
• in_reply_to is implemented as is because Twitter believe false negatives are better than false positives