I’ve seen a few reports of the “exclude replies” feature not working in the 1.6b1 release. This appears to be due to a change in the data returned by the Twitter API. The tweet data used to always include a message being “replied to” if the tweet started with @username. This is no longer the case.

What appears to have happened is that Twitter has refined its concept of a reply (probably factoring in duration of time between your tweet and the tweet being replied to, etc.).

While Twitter has made this conceptual refinement, the Twitter users don’t seem to have made the same mental adjustment. Twitter Tools used the data from the Twitter API – specifically the “in reply to” property – to determine if a tweet was a reply or not; then acted accordingly. So Twitter Tools is looking at the data and saying “Hmm, Twitter doesn’t think this is a reply” and the userbase is saying “Yes it is”.

After thinking about this, I’ve decided to change Twitter Tools to reflect the behavior the Twitter user base is expecting. You can grab the new version from SVN (see Download link at the bottom of the page) if you want this change immediately, or you can wait for the next release (probably sometime next week).

Feature Requests

I’m also getting a variety of feature requests for this plugin. These will likely not be added any time soon unless people are willing to fund the necessary development for them. Unfortunately I don’t have any free time to spend on building these right now.

This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.