Yesterday, a new service launched which aims to solve a “problem” with Twitter. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, its purpose is to answer the question, “What are you doing?”, so it’s easy to wonder why you would even expect a response. At any rate, Twitter has evolved into something that no one predicted: The stock trading floor of tech. Except in this case, it’s not stock that’s being traded, it’s tidbits of information.

One of the issues of this phenomenon, is tracking conversations. If Robert Scoble responds a question from someone on Twitter that I’m not following, I lose the context of the conversation. It’s a frustrating task to keep track of what’s going on. Enter Quotably which aims to solve the “problem” of conversation tracking in Twitter.

On paper, it sounds like a great idea and will make all of our lives easier. You simply go to the website, input your Twitter username, and out pops your Twitter conversations. When I first heard about it, I was instantly skeptical, because I knew the initial design of Twitter did not consider conversations, but only blast messages to the world on what you were doing. I took a quick look at Quotably, and my assumptions were correct, conversation context is guessing game. It’s almost impossible to determine the context of any conversation. If user A responds to user B’s tweet from yesterday, quotably does its best to fit the conversation in the right thread and most times it gets it wrong. It’s inevitable, but I commend Quotably on their efforts.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe Quotably has dramatically improved the way we look at Twitter, but it doesn’t fix the underlining problem: Twitter needs a re-design. Eric Rice agrees. There is no way to accomplish this functionality accurately without going to the root of the issue. To try to aid the issue, I sent this suggestion to the quotably author for consideration:

I believe this will aid the issue, but it will not fix it. Only Twitter can fix it. If you think I’m full of hot air, I took a screenshot of a conversation of Eric Rice and the Twitterverse about this very topic. Quotably tries, but fails. While you can make out some of the conversation, it tends to go way off topic.

Is this is a blog post to try to promote FriendFeed over Twitter? Absolutely not. As with SocialThing, they can’t be compared. As a matter of fact, I would love to have richer conversations on Twitter, but it’s a lost cause. Twitter needs work. It’s not completely their fault either. We have transformed it into something it wasn’t meant for, so now Twitter has to adjust. As for Quotably, I offer this:

And you can “quote” me

Related posts:

• Quotably Adds User Powered Context
• FriendFeed Still Reigns As Conversation King
• Tweetree’s Value Is Embedded Media
• An Open Sourced Twitter Emerges: Identi.ca
• Plurk: What’s the Big Deal?