MANILA, Philippines ? Read anything interesting today? Maybe you heard the news from a little birdie?or a ?Tweet,? as Twitter.com?s short messages are called.

While Twitter probably isn?t going to eclipse Facebook?s popularity anytime soon, the social network/news source is steadily gaining popularity around the world.

However, changes made to the Twitter system last week caused outraged (and confused) users to post a flurry of Tweets about them.

?Fixreplies? and ?TwitterFAIL? became trending topics on the site as users complained about the change to the @reply option, which no longer allowed people to view replies from Twitter users they didn?t follow.

At the start, Twitter had a set of three options for the site?s public reply feature: You could see replies to and from people you follow, from the users you follow to everyone they send replies to, or you could choose to not view any replies at all.

Thus, people could choose how much they wanted to see?if they really wanted to eavesdrop on conversations of people they may or may not have known.

Last week, Twitter simply set the first option as the default. While it was a welcome change for some parties, particularly those who didn?t care for the clutter on their Twitter feed, it made Twitter, simply put, boring to others.

It was harder for users to discover new users, especially if they were accustomed to adding new people to follow by seeing their friends reply to them via the @reply option.

The unexpected backlash prompted Twitter to immediately modify some of the changes and return the much-missed @reply option.

On the Twitter blog, developers said, ?Folks loved this feature because it allowed them to discover new people and participate serendipitously in various conversations. The problem with the setting was that it didn?t scale and, even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt.?

They added, ?We?re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account.?

So for the moment, it?s business as usual for regular Twitter users. Time to move on from last week?s most popular local Tweets about the Davids in concert, Alec Baldwin, the book blockade and Hayden Kho and his various scandals.

E-mail the author at biancaconsunji@yahoo.com