Oops! Twitter is Missing Something!

Twitter is constantly updating itself to keep up with the demands of its millions of users, however, in some of the more recent changes I have noticed that there is one thing from the Old Twitter that is still missing today.

I am referring to their email notifications of new followers. That is, when you receive a new follower, Twitter sends you an email (unless, of course, you've disabled this notification in your Twitter Account Settings) which provides you with a link to that person's profile. It also tells you if anyone you follow also follows this person. This information is handy and helpful, but one little thing these email notifications lack '" whether or not you already follow that person!

Old (original) Twitter's email notifications of new followers told you if you already followed your newest follower. You could tell with just a quick glance at the email whether it was someone you had not already added because the text below the main link was different, i.e. it did not include more profile links, but rather had fine print text about why you were receiving the email etc etc.

Today's Twitter email notification looks exactly the same whether you follow the new follower or not. There is no easy way to discern from the email if you have already followed that person and they are just returning the follow, or if you need to click their profile and add them to your list. Unless you have a superb memory and recall the name of your new follower as someone you've already added, you will have to click the profile link and wait for the "Follow" or "Unfollow" button to appear. This is quite annoying.

It may seem trivial to even complain about this, but those few seconds wasted on waiting for the profile page to load only to discover you already follow that person do add up. In this modern age where everything is instantaneous, we expect everything to work smoothly and quickly. Spans of wasted time, no matter how small, are looked upon with disdain and often the things which cause those periods of waste are tossed in the "user recycle bin" right behind those lost seconds of time.

Quite frankly, I am surprised that Twitter is still sending these same notifications. I really would have thought by now that enough Twitter users would have complained about it to get it fixed. Perhaps this will push things along?