Twitter Will Fix the '@ Reply' Bug

Twitter Will Fix the '@ Reply' Bug

After a kerfuffle on Twitter (and this here blog) over the possibility that Twitter broke its '@ reply' system, Twitter has responded saying it's working on the issue. "It's a bug. We should have a fix soon," a Twitter spokesperson told Gizmodo's Mat Honan.

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When the Incidental Economist's Austin Frakt wrote about the issue, it wasn't clear there was a bug at all. When we experimented with it on Twitter.com, TweetDeck and the Twitter app for iPhone, we didn't see a problem on Twitter.com or Tweetdeck, but when putting a period in front of an '@ reply' using the iPhone app, the conversation did not show up as it should have. Twitter user Philip Bump confirmed the same issue in a Tweet from yesterday. 

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But, after we posted our findings, Dan Diamond, who had discovered the issue with Frakt, pointed out the problem still persisted for him, sending us tweet conversations, like this one with @DailyBriefing that did not show up in his stream. "Note the coding here – this is coded as a reply, which means users can see the threaded conversation," he wrote to The Atlantic Wire in an email. "But it didn’t show up for me, despite following the Daily Briefing." A little back and forth over Twitter with Shoq Value, confirmed the problem was not limited to the app.

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Not only has Twitter confirmed that there is indeed a bug, but Twitter User Rob Begbie told Honan he noticed the issue over a year ago, in January 2011, meaning it has nothing to do with the most recent Twitter redesign, which changed the way conversations work, making following them easier.