What this man is looking for is a Slashdot thread when everyone else is used to picking up a conversation midstream. The idea of Twitter is that you're not trying to follow every piece of every conversation. The idea is that you dip in, you say something interesting, you see something interesting, and then you move on.
Twitter is not a chat room. It's not a forum. It's a stream. It's not thoroughly shitty. You're just looking at it with a set of expectations it shouldn't have.
There's a reason why Friendfeed doesn't have as many users as Twitter even though it offers some of the functionality you're suggesting. It's because it over-complicates the structure for end users.
Think about it this way. if you're in a bar, you don't get threaded, overly contextual conversations, either. You hear about something that somebody else said later. The world isn't made of threaded conversations. In that regard, Twitter is MORE like the real world than what you're asking for.
Twitter is simple. What you want is complicated. This isn't a design flaw.
This blog post has a shitty user experience. I got so bored reading all the paragraphs explaining what wasn't the problem that I never got to the part explaining what is.
Twitter is not a chat room. It's not a forum. It's a stream. It's not thoroughly shitty. You're just looking at it with a set of expectations it shouldn't have.
There's a reason why Friendfeed doesn't have as many users as Twitter even though it offers some of the functionality you're suggesting. It's because it over-complicates the structure for end users.
Think about it this way. if you're in a bar, you don't get threaded, overly contextual conversations, either. You hear about something that somebody else said later. The world isn't made of threaded conversations. In that regard, Twitter is MORE like the real world than what you're asking for.
Twitter is simple. What you want is complicated. This isn't a design flaw.