Overheard's emotion feature is unclear

It turns out that the emotion applies not to your reply to the post you "overheard", but to the overheard post yourself. How was I to know this? I thought I was happy to clear up a bit of confusion for a user, and also I can't tell what state they'd list themselves as in (other than, perhaps, happy or angry).

I’m frustrated

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EMPLOYEE

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Scott Fleckenstein, Official Rep, replied on May 27, 2008 22:55

I'm fixing it right now.

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Eric Suesz, (Official Rep), commented on May 27, 2008 23:04

Thanks!
Amy Muller, (Official Rep), commented on May 28, 2008 00:26

Yes, thank you, Scott. And thanks for reporting it Thomas. I found that very confusing too but it helps to hear from users!
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Thomas replied on June 30, 2008 05:35

I decided since this is about the interface, I'll report other similar bugs here:

I can't report the twitter user's emotion? It'd be nice to be able to. It'd also be nice to be able to set the status of the problem (not a problem, aware, working on it, solved) in the "first reply" to a Problem post.

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Scott Fleckenstein, Official Rep, replied on June 30, 2008 06:21

Personally, I wouldn't want you reporting on my emotion if you were to overhear one of my tweets. I don't want you putting words in my mouth.

I could see where we instead say "Thomas thinks nullstyle is annoyed" or something like that, but I don't see any practical value. The point for emotions is for a user to be able to more accurately express themselves. Allowing the overhearer choose an emotion for the overhearee doesn't accomplish that. Could you expand on why you would want such a feature? Where do you see the value?

To your second question, I agree. As a stop-gap, you can set the status of a topic by simply choosing a status and making a reply with no content and choosing the correct status. It will give you an error message, and the status won't update inline, but if you refresh the page you can see the new status will have been successfully saved. Ugly and hacky, but it works until we get time to fix it properly.

I’m thankful

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Thomas commented on June 30, 2008 06:27

I don't have to put words in, I can just use the happy or sad face to determine if the user is mad, or not. Also, I didn't know that it would still set the status even though you got an error, good to know.