Last Thursday I had the absolute pleasure of joining the lovely Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin on the eighth episode of The Big Web Show (read my previous post).

If you weren’t able to catch the live broadcast, be sure to check out the video and podcast.

We talked about how I’ve used Twitter to build my professional network, what it’s like to be a consultant, and all sorts of stuff about user experience. I had such a great time, and the hour flew by!

Thanks to everyone who tuned in, and especially to Jeffrey and Dan for making me feel so comfortable.

Watch now!

• The first Whit Hour was a success
• More than 600 people attend boxee NYC meetup
• Whit Hour – Week 4
• Finding a day and time for Whit Hour
• I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart 2009

I ask questions on Twitter all the time on a wide variety of topics, and I usually get really useful responses — but never as many as when I ask about interpersonal issues.

A little while ago I posed this question:

“What do you do when someone you really care about won’t respond to your emails & DMs, and won’t tell you why they’ve stopped talking to you?”

Here are a selection of the responses I received. What particularly interests me are the themes of taking the conversation offline and of letting it go. All great pieces of advice.

It makes me feel great to know that there are people out there who are always willing to help. Even in just 140 characters or less.

• Come see me at the 140 Characters Conference
• Business Cards and Twitter
• How Twitter has changed my life
• Twitter’s confirmation message is a usability fail
• Conference Twittering

It would mean a lot to me if you could please take a moment to complete the survey below. I’m helping to design a new Twitter client and your input will be invaluable. Thank you.

Survey link: http://bit.ly/4mMZWJ

Tweet this survey!

• Seeking All Independent User Experience Professionals in NYC
• Another Twitter Link Roundup
• Twitter.com finally removes their awful pagination
• Quotably
• Twitter buys Summize

Twitter had a Denial of Service Attack this morning, which affected its uptime all day today. Therefore I was forced to figure out what to do without it. Here’s what I came up with:

• I noted my frustration on Facebook
• I actually looked at my friends’ pages on Facebook
• I reached Inbox Zero in Google Reader and reorganized some feeds
• I read three newspapers (online)
• I refreshed the page ~700 times
• I organized some photos
• I read old emails
• I tweaked some plugins on my blog
• I thought about my life
• I wrote this post
• I saw a movie
• I got my nails done
• I refreshed UberTwitter ~50 times
• I thought of 15 important things I should have told the world today, but couldn’t

• links for 2008-02-25
• Ten Best Things and Five Worst Things About the BlackBerry
• Today is my 1 year anniversary on Twitter
• Twitter.com finally removes their awful pagination
• Links from 3/2/2008 to 3/5/2008

Last night there was a minor fiasco when hundreds of thousands of people suddenly found that their tweets were being published to their Facebook status without their explicit authorization. The only way to fix the problem was to remove or block the Twitter application from within Facebook.

Mashable is now reporting that the glitch was caused by Facebook, and not Twitter or FriendFeed whom initially appeared to be responsible for sending the tweets to your Facebook status.

A statement received from the Facebook team late last night:

“Earlier this evening, a small Facebook bug allowed a handful of apps to publish to the stream on behalf of users who had previously authorized the app. The situation has now been resolved, and all application settings will remain intact for users.”

Some users are still reporting that the problem is there, and that in order to fix it permanently one has to explicitly toggle the Twitter app publishing setting on and off in Facebook before it takes affect.

As of 9:30am ET Thursday, there is no comment on either the Facebook blog or Twitter blog about the incident.

Read more on CNET and Mashable.

• Twitter updating Facebook status without permission
• Twitter Blocks
• Twitter’s Most Moronic Change: Removing @ Reply Settings
• links for 2008-02-25
• Quotably

Update: For the latest information, please read UPDATE: Facebook at fault for unauthorized link with Twitter account.

[If Facebook suddenly started publishing your tweets, go into Facebook and REMOVE or BLOCK the Twitter application. That's currently the only fix.]

Just an hour ago, I got a notification that someone had commented on my Facebook status so I went to check it out. To my utter confusion, my status was actually a tweet that I had sent moments earlier.

I have never authorized Twitter to update my Facebook status, but it just started happening out of nowhere. I hadn’t changed any settings, added any applications, or even touched Facebook all day.

When I looked at my Facebook wall, I saw that these tweets were actually somehow being routed through FriendFeed. I hardly ever use FriendFeed, but I do have some of my social networking profiles linked there so I assumed that perhaps they had just changed a setting.

After looking at my FriendFeed profile I discovered that I don’t even have my Facebook profile linked to my FriendFeed account, nor do I have the FriendFeed app installed on Facebook, so that wasn’t the culprit.

Despite my never linking FriendFeed and Facebook in any way, I found that as I rolled over the tweet on my Facebook wall, I was somehow able to unauthorize FriendFeed from publishing to Facebook. Once I changed that setting I was sure I’d fixed it.

But I hadn’t! Now the tweets were still being published to Facebook, but this time it wasn’t through FriendFeed — it was just straight from Twitter.

After scouring the Twitter website for answers, I couldn’t find anything that would have caused this sudden change. The new Connections tab in Settings doesn’t list Facebook, so there was nothing I could do there.

I went back into Facebook and did the last thing I could possibly think of: I found the Twitter app within Facebook (which I had installed but without authorization for Facebook to publish tweets) and REMOVED the Twitter application. Problem solved.

It seems a whole bunch of people are now facing this problem and are really unhappy about it.

Whether it’s Facebook’s fault, Twitter’s fault or FriendFeed’s fault, it’s a giant user experience failure to change people’s settings without their consent, and then make it impossible to undo.

Hopefully the mystery will be solved soon. In the meantime, for those of you whose Twitter account suddenly linked to your Facebook status and you’re pissed off about it, just REMOVE or BLOCK the Twitter app within Facebook and that should do the trick.

• UPDATE: Facebook at fault for unauthorized link with Twitter account
• Twitter’s Most Moronic Change: Removing @ Reply Settings
• Twitter finally integrates Twitter Search a.k.a. Summize
• Facebook Privacy Settings Redesign on Fortune.com
• Social Feed Aggregators

I’m a do-it-yourself kinda girl, so instead of putting in a work order with the building staff, I’d prefer to at least try to fix things around the apartment myself.

Lately I’ve been noticing a problem with my dishwasher, so I thought I’d ask Twitter:

Not surprisingly, I got a lot of great advice. Here’s what the oracle had to say:

I think I may have fixed the problem, but I’ll have to wait until I have another full load to run to test it out.

Thanks to everyone who weighed in!

• Photo of the day: Whirlpool dishwasher utensil tray
• TwitterBerry was mean to me
• Photo of the day: Cigarette vending machine
• Twitter updating Facebook status without permission
• Redesigning the boxee experience

Today Twitter launched a redesign of the Following and Followers pages.

By default the Expanded view is displayed, but you can switch to the List view in the top left:

It’ll still show you 20 people per page, but without the location and last tweet sent.

On the right side of each username are two buttons: a Follow button and an Actions dropdown, which contains options to @ Mention, Direct Message, Follow/Unfollow, and Block/Unblock.

The Following page is very similar to the Followers page, but instead the Follow button is replaced by a Settings button to turn on/off notifications sent to your phone.

That’s pretty much the extent of it.

Improvements I would make:

• Previous/Next buttons at the top of the page
• Display of what page # you’re on (e.g., page 2 of 25)
• Display of the # range you’re looking at (e.g., Followers 30-49)
• On both the Followers and Following pages (but particularly for the Following page), display the Unfollow button in the same spot as the Follow button instead of hiding it in the Actions dropdown
• On the Following page, change the Settings label to Notifications, and put it in the Actions dropdown
• Mention and Direct Message buttons should open up a textbox at the top of the page instead of redirecting you to the homepage

That’s all I got for now. What other design and experience improvements would you like to see made to these pages?

• Twitter changes its email notifications
• Twitter.com finally removes their awful pagination
• Snitter
• Twitter’s confirmation message is a usability fail
• Facebook Privacy Settings Redesign on Fortune.com

Last week this photo was posted to BuzzFeed and made the rounds on Twitter. It’s originally from johnpiercy on Flickr.

I think it looks doctored, but John isn’t sure. It’s just too hilarious to be real!

What do you think?

P.S. If I was caught in or near a fire, I definitely WOULD use Twitter. My followers would help save my life.

• @whitneyhess on Acela Express
• Photo of the day: HSBC’s Pleasure and Pain
• Photo of the day: Please don’t touch, lick, stroke or mount the exhibits
• A year of Twitter statistics
• Photo of the day: You Can’t Un-Shit a First Impression

I’m furious. Absolutely astounded and ready to scream. Why? Because Twitter just announced a drastic change to their service that will forever affect how people interact with the stream. They have effectively removed all discoverability of new people to follow and connect with, thereby destroying the very element that made Twitter the powerful networking tool it has been for so many hundreds of thousands of people, myself included.

So what happened? Well today Twitter announced that due to some “confusions” they decided to completely the remove the @ reply settings and instead stick you with the very limiting default without any option to change it.

Previously Twitter settings looked like this:

By default for all users, the Replies setting was set to “Show me @ replies to the people I’m following,” meaning that any tweet prefaced with the username of someone you weren’t following would not appear in your stream. Some prefer this setting as a means to reduce the number of tweets in their stream, allowing them to only follow the conversations for which they follow both people involved. Makes sense that it’s an option, but it was never the one I had enabled.

Instead, when I first became a Twitter user almost a year and a half ago, I had selected the “Show all @ replies” setting, allowing me to discover new people whom the people I follow interact with. This is specifically how I’ve been able to grow my network to such an extent over a relatively short period of time. By learning who influences my influencers, I’ve been able to seek out more people who can have an influence on me — make new connections, learn things I might never have learned, discover crossover relationships I was never aware of.

The new design:

Now Twitter has decided to completely remove the @ replies setting and permanently filter out from the stream any @ replies to people you don’t follow. I think it’s asinine, and so do a lot of people I follow. Interestingly, you’ll also see that people are unaware of the change because they always had the default setting selected. Perhaps what Twitter really needed to do was to better educate users on the settings, NOT remove them entirely.

People’s reactions:

No, Twitter, this was NOT a “small” settings update. This was a major failure to understand a deep, longstanding value of your service. Start paying attention.

• Twitter changes its email notifications
• Twitter updating Facebook status without permission
• Twitter Redesigns Follower and Following Pages
• Twitter FINALLY turns replies into mentions
• My Twitter Karma