Some Twitter users are in an uproar over the company’s decision to hide replies to people you don’t follow.

Twitter’s blog explains what this means–basically, users used to have a choice  between two settings: viewing the feed of people that they follow to see their replies to people whom they do not follow, or to turn this off resulting in less tweets in their stream that were not relevant to them.  Now, Twitter has taken away that choice and is hiding the replies to those you don’t follow altogether.

Confusing?  A bit.  But many users who understand what this means are not happy with it, as was made clear yesterday when my Twitter stream started to fill up with hashtags like #fixreplies and #twitterfail.

Some see this as Twitter, in effect, blocking communication.  One large segment of the Twitterverse, small business owners, are especially ticked.

Hmm, are they taking some of the “networking” out of this social network?

As for me, I do wonder why they don’t just leave it up to us to make the decision and leave it as a setting we control.  Apparently they are reporting that the feedback was that the option was too confusing.  I’m not exactly rioting over it, but it’s certainly another interesting phenomenon to watch go down in real-time in my feed.  Let’s see how Twitter deals with it.

Do you care?  Totally clueless as to what I’m talking about?  Talk to me tweeps! 🙂

Photo Credit: keiyac