@replies that aren’t but are
Twitter has a reasonably reasonable set of @ reply settings. There are downsides, like idiots who mention a twitter account as the first word in a post, e.g. “@jX is so damn cool.”, where the tweet will be seen as a reply to jX and those who don’t follow him AND don’t see all @ replies, or who set their setting to no @ replies, will not see it. That’s why if you’re trying to publicize something, you should link the account somewhere after the start of your post.
However, there’s a way around this that functions as intended. Twitter recently added a long-requested feature, and now that the web bugs seem to have been worked out it’s helping awesomely. This feature also is available in the API, and some Twitter applications have been updated to tell Twitter what post you’re replying to. The feature is a new line: in_reply_to_status_id. If this isn’t specified in an @reply, the latest tweet id is pulled. However, if you’re using cURL or another application you can modify, you can reply to a specific tweet id and still have people who don’t see @ replies see it! AND it shows up in the Replies tab on the website (and thus in your twitter clients that support viewing replies)!
For cURL, you should do it like this (I tried with the status before the in_reply_to_status_id but it didn’t work). Here’s an example reply to this tweet from @AmazonSteals:
curl -u email:password -d in_reply_to_status_id=1043114166 -d status="This is actually a reply and will show up in the replies page too." http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
This is all obvious and I won’t explain any of it. However, I have successfully tested it and the tweet shows up in @AmazonSteals replies page and also in another user’s tweetstream that doesn’t follow amazonsteals and has no @ replies as their setting. This could be a bug, but I like to think of it as a special feature: almost nobody will go to these lengths to post an @reply in their stream that everyone can see. Perhaps it could be used for trackbacks. Maybe someone would tweet “I just bought a Fuzion Scooter from Amazon that I saw on @AmazonSteals” and set their in_reply_to_status_id to be 1043114166 so that it functions as a trackback. That’d be pretty cool.
If this post becomes popular and such, it’d be nice if Twitter added a separate feature allowing someone to indicate a post isn’t a reply so they CAN say “@jX is so cool”.
