Could Twitter better support conversations with a special @all address?
There's a couple of problems I've noticed with Twitter conversations:
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As the audience of the conversation grows, the number of characters remaining available for the message gets reduced, making it increasingly difficult to say anything.
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To make room for the message, recipients are sometimes removed, and then end up missing out on a part of the conversation.
I was thinking that Twitter could solve this with clever use of the special @all account, which Twitter would use to track the participants of a conversation.
Each tweet in a conversation would then show two address — that of the person tweeting, and then the @all address. When you reply-to-all on such messages (so that they appear to go to the speaker and the @all address), Twitter would add your own address to the internally-tracked conversation list.
Recipients on the conversation list would see the tweet from you, with cc to the @all account. Most importantly, everybody on the conversation would receive these tweets in their @replies list (helping to ensure they don't miss anything.)
Open issues and drawbacks:
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How do you know who's on the list? (Not a big deal..)
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How to unsubscribe from the conversation? (Maybe a bigger deal...)
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