The One Feature Twitter is Missing

I agree with your suggestion, but you could, in the meantime, use a link to a Terraminds search on your Twittr ID to see replies to you.

i.e. Terraminds Search for SheGeeks

Not ideal - but a good stop gap?

That would be a great feature, but at the same time I don’t want Twitter to lose its simplicity. I don’t want the developers to get caught up in creating a whole slew of features that would bog down the entire system.

As Matt mentioned, Terraminds is a great service, but it doesn’t quite get the results we want.

Great idea, though! Nice blog and nice to meet you…

I completely agree - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered a moment on Twitter where, for example, I ask a question and my next tweet is something like 10 hours later. And because of the fact that I’m following over 100 people, that may be one page too many backwards, if you know what I’m saying! A facebook wall-to-wall like feature would definitely give us a sense of not missing a single @you while you were away!

[With apologies in advance for length of comment but this is something I've kind of been obsessing over lately.]

God, no doubt. I’ve been angsting over the whole ships-passing-in-the-twitterverse (shitterverse? - no, there must be a good word for it) phenom for some time now. There are times when it makes me reluctant to participate in conversations because I want to be able to follow them (and have others follow them); it might also make me reluctant to post new tweets when an active conversation is occurring.

Of course, the issue was made even more obnoxious for me when I was first using Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin to post daily digests of tweets, a feature I’d loved at first because I may go many days without a blog posts, and the digest feature was a way of keeping my (only tangentially, and even then only occasionally tech-focused) blog at least somewhat up-to-date. I was actually going back, after the digests posted, and editing them out, a habit made even more neurotic by the fact that I’d end up trying very hard to get to that editing tasks before my feed hit one particular site where I’m syndicated. Because, not only were the (mostly non-tech) readers at that site not going to understand the “@” replies to begin with, but also, in the event they were curious enough to click on any of the hyperlinked # signs at the end of each tweet as it appears in digest form - which of course leads back to the original post on Twitter - and, from there, tried to click through on the “in reply to” link, they’d end up dead-ending at some other tweet to which that particular message was definitely not referring to (often with comical and/or completely inappropriate results).

Then a friend of mine - also one of my fave tech bloggers - Chris Lott wrote a modification for the plugin that offered an option to exclude “@” replies from digests, since which time I have suffered significantly less needless twittering and blogging angst. (Note this is not any kind of diss of Alex King’s plugin, which I think is genius. I’m just crossing my fingers that he might implement such a change in future versions.) To my knowledge, Chris isn’t offering a download of the mod, but his main site’s here, and he’s a gracious enough fellow that he might be (can’t speak for him, of course) amenable to requests to share, until such time as the same or a similar feature is incorporated in the original plugin. (Or, y’know, he could be really grumpy about my hyping his mod here. If so, sorry Chris! :P)

All that, of course, is aside from the point that a wall-to-wall feature would enormously improve the Twitter experience in general. I sincerely hope you and others will continue to make noise about that (we Z-list bloggers in mostly non-tech subjects can’t really hope to make such a splash)!