A few months ago, Twitter made some changes to their @reply system that prevented people from seeing conversations out of context. Everyone freaked out and Twitter clarified on their changes. I personally like the changes Twitter made.

Now I just wanted to give everyone a quick refresher on the current status of how @replies work. I feel like I regularly come across other Tweeps having trouble following conversations on Twitter.

The Basics

Twitter’s @replies still follow a lot of their originally proposed functionality. One of the main things a lot of people forget is that when you click Twitter’s “swoosh” button, your reply is now directly associated with that tweet.

If you ever receive a reply that seems out of the blue, check Twitter for the “in reply to ..” text and click to see what the Tweet was a response to. Most popular Twitter apps also display the “in reply to ..” text as well. Remember that Twitter can only associate your replies to Tweets when you use the “swoosh” button. Once again, most of the more popular Twitter apps have also embraced this functionality so there are no excuses.

Replying to people in this manner will prevent your reply from showing up in other people’s timelines when they are not following the person you are replying to. This becomes especially useful if you find yourself replying to people all the time and you are worried about posting too often. In short, it is an easy way to filter out the noise.

However, just because you won’t see conversations out of context in your friend stream, doesn’t mean you can’t hop over to Twitter search and view all public conversations taking place. In fact, Twitter Search can even thread your replies to help organize your conversations. If you are looking to see threaded conversations in a normal Twitter-like environment you should check out TweeTree which also displays videos and unshortens links.

Mentions

Mentions were adopted by Twitter when people started using @replies to reference other Tweeps in their tweets. The difference between replies and mentions is that when you mention someone you might not be talking directly to them. In this case, all of your followers would see your Tweet regardless of whether they are following the person you are mentioning or not.

Mentions won’t have the “in reply to ..” text because they are not necessarily directed at anyone.

Advanced Tweeting

You will regularly see people adding a . (period) before their @replies or placing some other text before the @reply to prevent it from becoming a semi-private conversation. It’s not always needed however there are times when you may wish to reply to someone and you want ALL of your followers to see the conversation taking place.

Remember that in the end, you can use Twitter however you damn please.

- Photo by db*photography

Here are 3 things you can add to your normal Twitter routine that can help deepen the experience and add more value to your conversations.

1) Reply to replies to let people know they’ve been heard (communicate)

In a perfect world, everyone would reply to everyone else’s tweets. When you think about how Twitter works and the number of followers that are actually online at any one point, you can see how this wouldn’t work.

Now imagine a real life scenario where you make a comment and someone responds however you don’t acknowledge their response. It can be demoralizing. If we can’t improve the quality of the conversation on Twitter overall, we can at least make an effort to make people feel included. At times this might not be possible due to the number of replies or simply that you are away from Twitter when a response is received but it’s the effort that counts.

2) Choose a follower and learn something about them (discover)

A lot of people join Twitter with selfish motives and secretly optimize their Twitter “strategy” to drive more traffic to their site. I have no problem with this as long as their strategy includes providing valuable content to the community.

Now what if we all took the time to learn something new about one of our followers every day. It’s the first step to creating real relationships beyond casual conversation. I think sometimes people forget that a big part of social media is it’s relationships.

3) See how your network interacts outside of twitter via Brightkite, Seesmic, FriendFeed, etc. (explore)

I’m becoming a big fan of video posts. There’s a certain level of honesty behind seeing someone’s facial expressions as they share their thoughts and ideas. I can’t guarantee that any one service is going to become big but I can say that all will have an affect on social media as we move forward. Seesmic has been making moves as well as sites like Brighkite and Tweetworks. So if the conversation on Twitter isn’t enough for you, why not enrich the conversation with some video, pictures or even a location.

- Photo by Poldavo (Alex)