At the end of last night's press conference, Scoble was doing an interview with a Twitter guy, I think his name is Jason Goldman. He said he was Vice-President of Product. Scoble observed that the changes they announced yesterday were cosmetic, that the underlying structure hadn't changed. The Twitter guy agreed. 

Then Scoble asked about a serious flaw in the structure, one that a lot of us have observed, and it's hard to see why it hasn't been fixed. I've written it up both in tweets and a blog post. Now Scoble got to actually ask a Twitter guy the question.  

Here's the problem.  

Someone addresses a message to you, like this: 

@bullmancuso, you should stick to writing about mob violence. You don't know anything about sports or the Mets. So STFU already. 

Okay, now assume three things: 

1. Bull Mancuso doesn't get a lot of responses, so that message is going to linger in his Replies tab for a long time, maybe weeks. 

2. Bull, even though he's a mob enforcer, is a sensitive guy, and this tweet hurts his feelings. 

3. But he's also interested in what people say about his tweets, so he's always checking the Replies tab. 

So here's the question for the Twitter guys. 

Q: Why does Bull have to keep looking at that offensive message? 

A: He doesn't. He could block the asshole. 

Which leads to the next question. 

Q: Wouldn't it be simpler to give Bull a command that just blocks that one message (you could call it Hide or Delete). 

A: ???? 

I'd love to hear a Twitter guy explain that one. Because blocking is a very serious thing to do, and probably is overkill.