Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed

A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.

Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.

But here’s the problem - Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.