Thin Blue Line

The apocalypse of Twitter is upon us.

That means nothing to you if you aren’t a part of the elite birds using this social media outlet, but for those of us who spend chunks of time building relationships in 140 characters or less, it spells pain, change and insanity.

Apparently the developers, with more time on their hands than good sense, came up with a “brilliant” idea to place a blue line in your home timeline to indicate a conversation is occurring between people you follow.  But wait!  That’s not all.  The first tweet in the conversation appears above the most recent reply.  The chronological order will help you follow the conversation and encourage more people to become involved. This idea reads well on paper, right?

In earlier versions, the user had to click the expand button to show the conversation.  How annoying!  They must have been inundated with complaints regarding such a burdensome process.  Now it’s much easier.  You can read the same post over and over and over and over again.  Because yes!  Every time a follower replies in a conversation, the first tweet is repeated!

Don’t dismay.  It does get easier if you walk away from the conversation.  Then when you return, you only have to read the original post once and follow the many responses to catch-up.  Oh, drat!  That defeats the purpose of encouraging participation though, doesn’t it?  Oh, and you may still have to click that blasted “expand” button because if you get more than 4 replies, that poor little blue line is broken into little dashes and the middle entries are hidden.

First reports suggests users are only unhappy with change,  the outrage regarding the “ugly pregnancy line” on Twitter is just a normal reaction to updates.  Unfortunately, they may be buried too deep in technology sand to see that users have massively peed on this stick and migrated to another platform.

The twits are crying in their nest on this sad day: “Please, take us back in time.  Don’t make us walk this Thin Blue Line.”