POV is amazing, isn’t it? The asymmetrical nature of Twitter is exactly one of the things I like most about it. It’s low maintenance. I don’t have to follow people who follow me and people whom I follow can reciprocate or not. None of this friending each other drama.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for friendship. I just don’t believe my personal relationships belong on the monetized Internet.

I’ll admit, Twitter had a bit of a learning curve as can be seen from my first tweet and comments about it on Flickr. [Remember Flickr?]

Unfortunately, what eventually drew me into Twitter was a feature which has long gone away: the ability to see @replies (they weren’t @mentions yet) of people whom I wasn’t yet following. That is, for example, when I followed John Gruber or Andy Ihnatko , I saw ALL their tweets to other users, whether I followed those users or not. THAT’S how I found people to follow on Twitter…by eavesdropping on interesting conversations. Twitter is about meeting people we don’t know yet. Sadly, Twitter made that harder to do, and thus made itself less interesting, when it snuffed out @replies.

Perhaps bringing those back would be a step in the right direction.