Twitter News — New Features
Twitter rolled out two new features on August 10, 2011. They introduced two new tabs, @Username that replaced @Mentions and Retweets tabs, and the Activity tab.
The new tab with your @Username keeps you up to date on your Tweets that are Favorites, the latest Retweets (of your Tweets), Tweets directed to you (replies and mentions), and your new Followers.
The other new Activity tab highlights the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow on Twitter.
They announced these two new features in their blog on August 10, 2011:
Today, we’re rolling out two new features on Twitter.com that help you discover more on Twitter. You can now see when someone favorites or retweets one of your Tweets. You can also learn which Tweets are most interesting and inspiring to the people you follow.
Read the full story on Twitter Blog
As it has become a trend on the social network, twitter released the new features for some users and will continue to gradually roll out to all Twitter users. The new features appeared for the first time today on my account, three months after its first release. Besides the late appearance what is even more irritating is that the new features are full of bugs.
The Activity tab is a lot like such a feature on Facebook that is disliked by most users. Facebook lets you mute users who are too active but Twitter doesn’t offer any such filter. I fail to understand why should one care or find useful such information, except perhaps, spammers and #tfb users whose only preoccupation is to blindly follow and list anyone, and retweet any damn tweet that comes their way. A super active #tfb user makes the stream look so ugly. Lastly, you will have to read such so called information in split seconds.
The @Username tab is an improvement over @Mentions tab as now you see not only mentions, but also tweets that were retweeted, who followed you, who favorited your tweet, and more at one place. And if you want there is a Show mentions only checkbox to see mentions only.
While using the @Username tab today, I found many bugs.
The most irritating and misleading bug that I found was that even though I am following a user yet on the right panel I see Follow button rather than Following button, and the Message icon missing.
But if I visit his profile, I find the Following button and Message icon, confirming that I am following him.
I do not follow aggressively. One of my criteria is to follow someone who mentions me, retweets or favorites my tweets, or engages in conversation with me. The right panel always helped me to find out whether I am following a certain user or not, his bio, tweets, etc without visiting his profile.
So this bug till it goes would slow me down on Twitter as its very time consuming to visit a user’s profile. Luckily I found a clue. If only you are following someone then you see Recent images, and if you are not following then you get the message:
But this clue won’t help if someone has never uploaded any image.
Second bug I have come across is about the disappearance of the Retweet icon. I generally don’t cover my mentions stream in one go as then my followers would see too many Retweets clubbed together. So I retweet a few mentions, and return later to retweet further. Now the clue to my last retweet is the green Retweet icon, as you see below (upper left corner):
Today, I was surprised to find that when I visited the @Username tab again, all Retweet icons had disappeared. And if by mistake I tried to Retweet a tweet again, I got the message:
So I have sour feelings about these new features which have come to me after three months waiting, and still full of bugs.
Please, share your views about the new features by writing your valuable comments.
You may follow me on Twitter:
Subrato Paul@goldenTwine Kolkata, India
Founder, GoldenTwine Informatics, Entrepreneur, website designer and developer, Internet marketer, social media enthusiast, and blogger.
http://www.goldenTwine.com/
Follow @goldenTwine
