Twitter's Spectacularly Awful 24 Hours

Twitter just went through an awful 24-hour stretch. It included taking away a feature some people loved, probably being misleading about it, getting a huge amount of backlash, halfway bringing the feature back, and getting railed by the press for it all ¿ with bouts of downtime mixed in for good measure.

This is hardly the first time Twitter has had everyone up in arms, and it won't be the last, but it's pretty astonishing how the company seemed to solve one problem by creating two more. Sure, it's easy to play desk-chair quarterback, and probably a bit unfair ¿ but it's also fun, and a good cautionary tale, so let's do that.

Here's how the past 24 hours at Twitter went down:

Problem 1: Twitter yanks the option to see @replies directed towards people you don't follow.

Why it was odd: Because it was just an option, and not the default setting. Users will never like options being taken away from them. Why remove an option? Well, we'll get to that.

Problem 2: Twitter writes a blog post explaining that the change will "better reflect" how people use Twitter. It claims this is based on usage patterns and feedback.

Why it was odd: Has Twitter learned nothing from Facebook over the past few years? If you're going to make a change, even if you're sure it's the right one, let the users know before you do it. That's true even if you have no intention of listening to feedback ¿ which may also be the right play, more on that later.

Problem 3: Prominent Twitter employees start tweeting about their distaste about the change. This includes tweets of uncertainty from CEO Evan Williams.

Why it was odd: If you really are making what you think is the right call, don't waffle ¿ and especially don't waffle on the service you created to let everyone see your thoughts in public. Users will pick up on this waffling, smell blood and go in for the kill.

Problem 4: Twitter writes a post the next day containing the following sentence, "The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt¿"

Why it was odd: This absolutely should have been in the first post on the matter. Hell, it should have been the key subject of the first post. Now it just seems like Twitter was being purposefully misleading about the reason it removed the option. I was at dinner the previous night discussing this change. Everyone at the table agreed it was clearly done for scaling purposes, if we all knew that, why did a co-founder of the company have to be "reminded" about it? He didn't. It was just a mistake not to be honest about that upfront.

Problem 5: Twitter goes down for its scheduled maintenance, the second such one during the middle of a work day, in a week.