Twitter Moves From Replies To Mentions

Pretty big news from Twitter.com broke yesterday – the interface on the Twitter.com home page has been tweaked, and you no longer have an @replies feed. Instead, it’s been replaced with mentions, which are accessed via clicking on @yourusername in the sidebar (i.e., @sheamus).

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This is a great step forward for Twitter. Previously the @replies inbox only listed tweets that began with an @ message to your username; now, any mention of your username (@sheamus, say) in a tweet will appear in this feed, irrespective of where it appears in the message. This includes re-tweets, #followfriday recommendations and so on.

I like this a lot because many people miss non-direct replies and this can only make the stream more engaging, certainly if you predominately use the Twitter.com home page as your main point of access.

However, it’s still not, in my opinion, as good as what can be done using a search pane on TweetDeck, and I’ll be doing (my very first) video tutorial about optimising TweetDeck in this way later this week, which will include tips on minimising that precious API drain.

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