Blog

Replying to Multiple Users

February 21, 2009

I’m astonished that many people don’t know this. Say @atebits wanted to send a tweet to a bunch of users, he might try something like this:


@user1 @user2 @user3 let's all go to a party.

Looks good, right?

Wrong.

First, some background on how replies in Twitter work (as of Feb 2, 2009 – they are updating all the time).

Twitter provides two ways to reply to someone. The first is to simply prefix a username at the start of a tweet. So for example, @user1 could type in: “@atebits man, I would *love* to go to a party with you.“, and @atebits would see it as a reply to him. Awesome.

The other way to reply is to reply to a specific tweet. You can do this on twitter.com by clicking the little gray reply arrow next to a tweet. You can also do it in a client (that support it) by clicking the reply button when viewing a specific tweet. This does two things, first: it automatically prefixes a “@username” at the beginning of the tweet. Second: it sets the in_reply_to_status_id flag when posting to Twitter.

This last point is particularly cool – it’s a way for you to reply to a specific tweet. When people view this tweet on twitter.com, there will be a small link at the end of the tweet that says something like “in reply to atebits“. When you click it, it will take you to the specific tweet that user was replying to. In a client that supports following reply chains (like Tweetie), you can tap a button to see the tweet that someone was replying to.

Now, back to the original point. You wanted to invite @user1, @user2 and @user3 to a party. But @user1 was the only person to get back to you. You could conclude that @user2 and @user3 think you smell and would never go to a party with you, or you could learn a little more about how Twitter replies work.

The truth is, @user1 is the only one who saw that message in their Replies. @user2 and @user3 didn’t see it in their Replies at all. This is because Twitter only considers the first username as the person you’d like to reply to… it has no concept of multiple replies.

Today, if you want to send a reply to three people, you have to send three separate tweets.

I agree that it would be nice if you could include a few different @usernames in a tweet, and every username mentioned in it would get it as a reply. But that’s not how it works today, so you should keep it in mind. If you want it to change, well, I’m the wrong person to talk to – you could ask Twitter here and see what happens.

As a side note: this is one of the reasons why Tweetie doesn’t include a Twitter “friend address book” in the Compose screen. A lot of people have requested it so they can reply to multiple people… to them I say: please read this blog post. There is a second reason why Tweetie doesn’t have that feature, but it’s more technical and probably deserves another blog post (short version: it would be a hack, and if you see it in any other Twitter client today, I can pretty much guarantee that it’s a half-assed implementation).

Update: If you find yourself wanting to send a tweet to multiple users often, you might want to read Twitter Groups (Type 1) and check out http://www.grouptweet.com/, a very cool looking service.