Comments on: Why the Fuss Over Twitter’s Quick Bar Won’t Go Away

By: Bobbie Johnson

Bobbie Johnson — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:57:37 +0000

Snob is one word for it, but I think what Frank Rock was objecting to was the fact that racist and insulting trends often pop up. I don’t think it’s snobbery to suggest that you don’t want to be insulted… is it?

By: Cyndy Aleo

Cyndy Aleo — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:08:10 +0000

Liz, I’d disagree. The whole point of using things like Twitter is that you can assemble your own social graph. Once you’ve done that, things that are important within that context would be considered trends, and I think if the dickbar contained THAT type of information rather than a forcefeed of things that are already available right on Twitter’s home page. It would be more valuable to users as well as advertisers, who could target by interest instead of generating the equivalent of spam.

This move is spitballing, and it’s stupid when the company already has so much information at its disposal that could be used to create a much more valuable offering.

By: Liz

Liz — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:28:23 +0000

It’s so easy to dismiss this as kvetching by a bunch of privileged super-users — “why aren’t you building something just for us?”

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You read my mind with this statement. Except I wouldn’t call them “super-users” but rather “snobs”. It’s too bad you don’t find trending topics useful but many people find them amusing or learn about U.S. and international news by seeing what subjects are trending.

I’m not sure about this particular Twitter app but many will let you select the city/country rather than the worldwide/global setting so the list you see would be more relevant to where you live.

But trends shouldn’t be too customizable because they are supposed to show what is currently of interest to a large number of your fellow Twitter users or, as Rock calls us, “mouth-breathing buffoons”. You know, the majority of people who use Twitter.

By: Sky

Sky — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:59:57 +0000

“But five years on from the first ever messages sent by Twitter’s founders, actions like this are bound to make people wonder whether they really know what it is they have built.”

Bingo. My biggest concern is that Twitter Inc. is taking this technology in a direction away from what people actually want to use it for. Its future needs to be as a @Anywhere / embedded feed, which means their advertising cannot come along for the ride as a core element that may clash within a user’s environment. I believe this unbranded embed-ability is what makes Twitter potentially more useful than Facebook.

Similarly, I am using a few alternate Twitter clients that do very different things than the “official” client which I don’t find very useful. It would be a shame for Twitter Inc. to drive out all the 3rd party clients; if this happens, then Twitter will become much less useful to me and I would likely discontinue using the service.