Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

You may want to think that your audience love you unconditionally, but is this really the case? Can you take them for granted? Just because they love and respect you now,  you can’t just assume that they will always be loyal. You need to hold up your side of the relationship; something that twitter found out this week.

#fixreplies and #twitterfail were two hashtags dominating twitter and blogs earlier this week. The cause of these was down to an unexpected and largely unsupported change that twitter made to it’s service.

During its growth twitter has adapted what it offers based on what the users have wanted, whilst at the same time needing technical changes to make it more robust to deal with the sudden massive uptake of subscriptions. A lot of these changes have been based on popular services that have used the twitter API to create new ways for it’s users to interact with their twitter accounts. This has strengthened loyalty amongst twitter users, as it has answered their needs. However, this week twitter made the mistake of making a surprise change that was unwanted by a lot of its users (including me!)

In brief: previously you had the choice of either only seeing when your friends were talking to your other friends or, also seeing what your friends were saying to other people that you weren’t friends with; twitter removed the latter choice without any notice. This received a huge backlash, which they have seemed to have scrabble around for a series of explanations for since. The twitter blog has gone something like this over the past few days:

1. Small Settings Update: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html – Initially the reason was given to make it better for users. This was translated by loyal fans as being for the newer users rather than the people who have been using twitter for a year or two.
2. Whoa Feedback http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/whoa-feedback.html – The second reason given was technical limitations. This was interpreted as either a bit of a cover up, or twitter having not told the full story earlier.
3. We Learned a Lot http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html And finally (for now) with slightly more explanation and promises to deliver something better soon, but still not addressing some of the users concerns (tagged as #ducttape).
4. Replies Kerfuffle (Just in since I wrote my original post) http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/replies-kerfuffle.html twitter admit they messed up, give a full(er) explanation and appololgise.

The overall effect of this is that there are still some annoyed users that have lost some faith in twitter.

So could twitter have handled it better? Well, as one of the disgruntled users I would say ‘yes’. twitter had gained enough respect to just tell the truth in the first place. Had they said they had technical problems (as has been the case a few times during their rapid expansion)  the community would have been far happier to accept the change and support twitter through it, rather than left feeling a bit let down.

We should all be learning from this,  our users are people too, they aren’t stupid  and they don’t like the wool being pulled over their eyes. Is it better to try to be seen as never making a mistake and risk losing the faith of your audience; or, to accept that as humans we sometimes mess up and be honest with them? Whatever twitter say next they have a lot of people listening, but communication and transparency are going to be the key.