Replies/Conversations don't seem to work with Twitter

[Kai Mast]

When expanding a Facebook posts I can see comments/replies. However, this never worked with Twitter posts for me. Is this functionality implemented for Twitter also?

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

No, this was never implemented really, it was a bit tricky at the time because Twitter 'replies' also show up publicly in the public feed, and the problem is that friends only lets messages show up in one single 'feed', so if we marked replies as replies, then they wouldn't show up in the main feed at all. So basically this is a matter of a poor mapping between friends' model and twitter's messages.

[Kai Mast (kai-mast)]

Do you think it would be possible to change the relationship between posts and feeds so this would be allowed? If so, I would take a look at it. Its a crucial feature in my opinion.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Uhhhhhh.... thinking about this, probably the easiest way to get the behavior you want would be to duplicate the tweets in the model (eg, once with 'messages' stream and once with 'reply_to/#####' stream. Then friends-app should do the rest automatically.

I'm not sure if there's a way to fix this "properly", I guess the best solution would be to allow the stream to be a list instead of a single value, then twitter could specify two streams while facebook only ever specifies one. I'm not sure how difficult that would be to implement though, probably lots of little changes would need to be coordinated across components.

[Kai Mast (kai-mast)]

Yeah that seems to be the easiest way to me too. I also see no downside to duplicating the tweets (the additional space needed should be negligent).

Will assign this to me. This is the last big issue I have with Friends. If that it is fixed it is pretty usable for me \o/

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Thanks for all your contributions, Kai. Ken and I got reassigned and haven't had a lot of time for Friends in the last ~6 months.

[Kai Mast (kai-mast)]

No problem. Could you maybe add a small comment to my wiki page? I am applying for Ubuntu Membership: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/kai-mast

[Kai Mast (kai-mast)]

I actually thought of a problem with that. If I click on a reply in my timeline I expect to also see the message that was replied to. Like on this screenshot: http://sproutsocial.com/insights/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Example-of-the-complete-conversation.jpg

If the messages are duplicated, there is no way (that I can think of) to do that.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

That is a good point.