I used to be on twitter. Left because nobody talks with you, just at you. And when you do actually get a conversation going, it's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations. The hashtag doesn't do much to foster conversation either. Merely a way to label slogans. This dichotomy between being a public feed but also being a place for conversations is at the core of why twitter sucks.
These lines for conversations are new. If you follow the original poster and one of the people replying, it will pull out their responses and put them right in the timeline with a blue line. It sorts in your timeline according to the latest reply from someone you follow. Below that, you can see someone replying to themselves in a longer series of tweets, and Twitter folds them up so they don't clutter your timeline too bad.
I ended up questioning some news anchors for an hour yesterday on one of the feeds, and the thought hit me about how much better this was than just the news.
I agree. They owned the 'better than the rest' crown, compared with G+ and Facebook. With a crippled conversation model.
Now, with the recent articles about Twitter's apps collecting the list of applications you have installed on your mobile, I tend to think that Twitter is as broken a concept as 'You can shout 140 characters - but no more - and people need to reply just as terse' sounds to your granddad. There's no way to justify the crazy limitations and the owner of the platform turns out to be another FB.
Tweets are threaded now. Conversations work, though can break down if people compose new tweets with an @mention instead of the reply button.
Can break down with sub-conversation trees a little, but that's hardly only twitter's problem. I'd be more than happy with reddit-style @reply threads.
That depends on whether you carry your friends there with you or not, I guess. I don't see why it should be different to Facebook in that regard. (I have probably sent thousands of DMs over the years.)
