Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

http://www.marco.org/3991237704

by starnix17 • 15 years ago

250 101 15 years ago

It's not just the dickbar that's offensive - it's the fact that its release along with the announcement that Twitter is going to try to limit the development of other clients against their API that really makes it distasteful.

I understand that they have a need to monetize - I get it, but to do so in such a ham-handed way really bothers me.

robryan3• 15 years ago

Was just thinking about this, it would be great if they did do targeted advertising and did it through an API, so 3rd party clients could choose to include ads and both Twitter and the 3rd party takes a cut, or allow them to continue without advertising but ban other advertising meaning that they can only monetise by selling the app or including Twitter ads.

Aaronontheweb2• 15 years ago

I think this is an AWESOME idea.

forkandwait4• 15 years ago

Is the sms -> internet/ server -> sms pathway tied up in business patents by Twitter? I am sure I am (sort of) underestimating, but Twitter seems like a weekend project for a couple of decent hackers; if they piss enough people off is there any reason to stick with them except for (VERY non-trivial) first past the post market share?

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

Ooh, another "it's just a weekend project!" comment.

Next step: convince everyone to use your weekend project, instead of Twitter. Allowing people to import all of their tweets and friends would be helpful, so be sure to implement that.

Next next step: Handle all of Twitter's traffic. Consistently, and you not only have to do it better than they did in the beginning, but better than they do it now.

jonursenbach• 15 years ago

Also create mobile clients for everybody to use. And don't forget about an API.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Here's the thing. If it were anything other than a major endeavor to replace twitter it would have been done by now.

It is a big problem and not just from an engineering standpoint. The same for facebook.

On the plus side, for competition at least, as hardware technology advances it'll become easier and cheaper to match twitter's capabilities with less effort.

forkandwait4• 15 years ago

Rather than downvoting my rather heavily caveatted remarks, perhaps you could answer the question: Is there a patent encumbrance that makes this more than a technical problem?

EDIT: moved "heavily qualified" to something more idiomatic.

djcapelis3• 15 years ago

Since it's sometimes considered nice to explain a downvote, I wanted to mention I downvoted you for spending time telling us how qualified you were instead of just restating your question in a simpler way.

I don't know why your other post was downvoted, but probably because people think it's not an interesting question, could be determined by actually going to Google yourself and doing your own homework/search and most people don't feel like patents, if they exist, are the problem with twitter's dominance.

generalk• 15 years ago

No, there's probably not a patent encumbrance. IANAL.

But there's so much more that makes it more than just a technical problem. Ask your random 40-year-old working in a non-tech industry if they've heard of Twitter. Now ask them if they've heard of StatusNet or identi.ca.

In a nutshell, that is what makes it more than just a technical problem.

defen• 15 years ago

Instead of doing that, a team of one computer literate person could fork StatusNet, and you could spend the rest of the weekend trying to convince Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen to join your service, and buying hardware to support them.

dreyfiz• 15 years ago

No.

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Twitter&btnG=Search+Pate...

Although they did make Loren Brichter patent "pull to refresh":

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Loren+Brichter&btnG=Sear...

Also, please don’t be "I could clone that in a weekend" guy. Everyone hates that guy.

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-ha...

You could make a piece of crap implementing Twitter’s models and create/read/update/delete in a weekend. Or really, in under an hour with Rails scaffolding. Congratulations, you have now proved that you can guess the schema from using an app. You don’t have a product, or even one tenth of a product.

First-past-the-post has nothing to do with Twitter’s success; polish and thought and sweating the details has everything to do with it.

cygwin982• 15 years ago

I don't know why you got so many down votes. Maybe HN folks got too sick of armchair architects/hackers. Honestly, what your said somehow resonated my inside hacker. I think lots of hackers share similar opinion --- as hardware/network are getting so much cheaper nowadays, it may be very feasible to build and operate "web-scale" apps like Twitter and Reddit with small but capable man powers. Lots of people here agree that the main problem is less of a technical one, but more of a business one --- how to jump start a community in an area especially with a seemingly winning market leader over there. Perhaps, there are still opportunities in the area. Maybe Twitter will be the next Google or maybe not.

Back to the topic, three months ago someone went ahead and pulled off a high-performance (no sure its scalability) Twitter clone in C. I recalled it's a good discussion on such a topic.

Discussion can be found on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/comments/f16mw/ive_never_been_impresse...

Its website is at http://blerg.dominionofawesome.com/

ALXfoo• 15 years ago

Not just that, with the new update every time you launch the iPhone app it asks you "Twitter would like to use your current location, allow, don't allow"

No means no

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Does it continue to ask you, once you've answered "allow"?

robc• 15 years ago

That's interesting. The alert should only be presented to you twice - if you respond No to both cases, it should simply disable location services for the app.

Mind you, I did that manually - at least once I discovered it leaves them enabled the whole time the app's running, which means a significant battery hit on the GPS.

bartjacobs• 15 years ago

I agree with Marco Arment and Jeff Rock in that it is perfectly understandable that Twitter wants to monetize their business if they wish to do so, but based on their recent decisions it seems that they are taking a path that will damage their business along the way. Also, I have never understood the value of trending topics. It is just one of the many metrics inherent to how Twitter works, but it is far from the most useful metric since Twitter is so full of spam and people that have nothing useful to say (which is their good right of course).

Anyway, all this does make me curious to see how Twitter is going to change in the next few months and I hope for the best - for them and for the users.

Duff3• 15 years ago

The funny thing is, clients like Twitterrific and Tweetie pre-Twitter takeover managed to figure out how to monetize the client years ago.

The Fusion Ads that were featured on Twitter in particular were excellent -- I actually found some the ads interesting enough to click on.

forkandwait4• 15 years ago

Let me rephrase from earlier -- is Twitter technology patented?

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

Why?

To reiterate, yes you could build a clone, but the odds of duplicating Twitter's success is almost nil at this point.

Or are you asking if they're legally capable of forbidding people from creating other clients?

bonzoesc• 15 years ago

The tech (multicast messages) isn't patented, and there's no legal prohibition on creating clients. The only client concern is that clients use OAuth, and can be disabled by Twitter staff as necessary. A disabled client is probably legally barred from returning to the service too.

mcav• 15 years ago

No.

daveman692• 15 years ago

Am I mean for just not caring what's currently trending on Twitter? Feels like a similar problem to showing ads on blogs. I'm there for the content and the ad has to be exceptionally good in order to get any of my attention.

Stwerner• 15 years ago

For a while now I've thought it would make sense to create 'relevant trends' for users - take the people you follow and the people they follow, and generate 10 trending topics From those people's tweets. Trending topics would become so much more useful.

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

This. I don't think people realize that (I hope) most of Twitter's users are interested in specific people, not the generic Twittersphere.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Because I am an engineer and I battle distractions all day, I have always thought of hashtags as Twitter's dumbest feature. Back when Twitter was new it took me weeks to understand just why people were complaining about spammers. How could you be spammed on Twitter? I asked myself. Shouldn't you just unfollow the spammer and get on with your life?

But since then I have had the occasion to witness marketers using Twitter. And I have learned that, to a marketer, hashtags are pure heroin. You get to eavesdrop on strangers discussing products. You can count references to your product, and to your competitors' products. So what if this activity bears the same relationship to actually getting out of the building that playing Rock Band does to a real blues jam? It's a rush, and it comes in optimal tiny doses like Snackwell cookies, and it almost feels like productive work. From what I can tell a majority of the marketers in the world have Tweetdeck open all the time and wince reflexively every time anybody on Twitter says anything bad about their pet trademarks. To ask them to do otherwise is like asking a novelist to stop compulsively reloading their Amazon sales rank over and over.

johns• 15 years ago

Without hashtags, you can still do most of this with regular ol' keyword searches. So I think search is your real enemy here, not hashtags.

mattgreenrocks• 15 years ago

I find the trends offensive; as they seem to suggest that it'd be better if I talked about a certain topic, which is often terribly banal and uninteresting. Mostly because I believe the last thing the world needs is yet another mechanism to shove popular culture into people's faces: if it was so good, it wouldn't have to be hyped as much.

DanI-S• 15 years ago

I'd be interested to hear what 'normal', non-power users of Twitter think. The 'mouth-breathing buffoons' that Jeff Rock so denigrates (and evidently make up most of Twitter's users) may actually like this UI feature.

Viewing the world through nerd-tinted spectacles makes many things seem horrible that are perfectly OK to a regular person.

panacea• 15 years ago

Surely "mouth-breathing buffoons" is short-hand for 'not my niche/circle of interest apes'.

We're all primates with our own monkey-sphere, and our inner circle of orangutans will be most important to us.

Some of us choose to read Daring Fireball (http://bit.ly/60LKTH) and follow John on twitter. But twitter is telling us in the most prominent position they have that we should be interested in this: http://bit.ly/1F5sWF.

alexqgb• 15 years ago

If you're on HN, you're probably a nerd, which means your Twitterstream (if you have one) is probably pretty interesting. Just for fun, click on the hashtag for any given trending topic. Note the (extraordinary) difference in quality, tone, and general signal:noise ratio.

You will realize that (a) Twitter can provide amazing filtration (b) this filter is 100% necessary and (c) the filter is exactly what the #dickbar undermines.

It's like an airplane engine that fails on purpose.

joe_the_user• 15 years ago

Great question...

My guess is that each micro-demographic thinks of the other micro-demographics as 'buffoons' or perhaps 'horn-rimmed nerds'. If someone wanted to find out what the masses were enjoying, they'd be watching network TV instead.

Duff3• 15 years ago

It shouldn't matter.

In 2011, people interested in NCAA basketball should see sports stuff. People interested in Ruby on Rails or Amazon EC2 should see IT stuff. It should be pretty easy to spot people's interests on Twitter.

Amazon.com doesn't recommend women's clothing to me. Netflix doesn't show me Spanish language movies.

Skroob• 15 years ago

This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen before. Why shouldn't Twitter target trends at me? They know my tweets, and tweets of the people I follow. They could target trends, and ads for that matter, that I'd actually like to see.

officemonkey2• 15 years ago

>Netflix doesn't show me Spanish language movies.

That's too bad, because you're missing out on "The Sea Inside" and "Y tu mamá también".

Interestingly enough, Netflix does pitch foreign movies at me regularly.

kajecounterhack• 15 years ago

I wouldn't consider myself a power user so: I personally use twitter to embed a quick status update on my blog, or to put stream of consciousness thoughts every once in a while. Since I don't use mobile to do updates, I don't really see/mind this said "dickbar" though from how everyone is describing it, it sounds lame?

I'd venture to say that there are many others like me who use different twitter apps (echofon for firefox, chromed bird, twitter tools for wordpress) who aren't affected. I can see how this could be pretty terrible for someone who exclusively uses twitter with mobile, though. Oh well.

davidedicillo• 15 years ago

Marco totally nailed it. At this point I'd rather something adsense-like that can push ads I could be interested in (possibly with the quality of the Fusion or Deck ads).

dr_• 15 years ago

Maybe the bar should only appear when one conducts a search - so it could have some relevance to what is being searched - rather than right on the main screen.

danilocampos2• 15 years ago

Marco nails it.

The whole value proposition of Twitter, historically, has been that you can make it whatever you would like it to be. Are you Captain Nerd? Load up that stream with the finest of curated nerds and be soaked in their wisdom, go! Are you nuts about celebrity culture? Sports? Food? Just want to keep up with your friends and colleagues? You're covered.

The Dickbar is a violation of that understanding that needlessly undermines Twitter's brand and utility among the fiercest of its loyalists. There are many better ways to monetize the experience here. AdWords-style keyword based stuff being the most obvious, and most likely to be virtuous. Pitch me awesome iDevice accessories and apps all day long – I bet I'd actually care about them. Design sites? I'll check it out! Magic kitchen tools? Where?! Awesome restaurants near me? I will eat there!

Sports? Celebrities? Hell. No.

This is crass and it's a fuck up, plain and simple. Five years from now we'll look back and one of two things will be on our minds:

"Wow, glad Twitter rethought that garbage and built something that truly worked for both users and advertisers. What a powerhouse they are."

"Twitter? Was that like Friendster or something? I think I remember it."

cabalamat2• 15 years ago

> Five years from now we'll look back and one of two things will be on our minds

You are probably right. But how, in that case, do Twitter monetize their service?

alnayyir• 15 years ago

>. There are many better ways to monetize the experience here. AdWords-style keyword based stuff being the most obvious, and most likely to be virtuous.

Did you read the comment?

bryanh3• 15 years ago

Targeted ads are so obvious that I don't understand why they haven't implemented it. Google did it successfully. Facebook did it successfully. In fact, if someone would have said to me a year ago "Twitter will totally ignore their massive pool of user specific data in favor of blanket ads!" I would have literally laughed in their face. "Twitter isn't that thick!" I'd say.

It reminds me of the time I tried to partner with a local print heavyweight over a local portal site w/ a super premo domain. His suggestion was to purchase and post AP content on it.

I just don't follow Twitter's strategy here.

danilocampos2• 15 years ago

It's truly just... insane. There's not a better word for it than that. My tweets are a wealth of data about things I care about. There are so many ways to sell truly useful ads against that – you have to be off your nut not to take this approach. Real-time ads that solve your problems without you doing anything more than gabbing away could make Google look like a two-bit lemonade stand.

"Fuck, I hate AT&T. Worst cell phone service ever."

"Join Verizon today! Get $100 credit when you switch from AT&T."

"... Go on."

edit: And assuming you use Twitter mostly for passive consumption, there's still useful to be derived from your stream. "Boy, this guy sure follows a lot of people from Portland, let's show him Moe's Bike shop ads."

notahacker• 15 years ago

Isn't the other major problem that "promoted tweets" simply take people to a stream of tweets with that hashtag, which could include smart competitors?

I'd assume it isn't that difficult to write a bot that autoposts with that hashtag each time a "trending topic" vaguely relevant to their area of business shows up. Certainly not compared with the SEO dance.

And if spammers are optimising their ads better than you..

icarus_drowning• 15 years ago

What I find interesting about this analysis is the fact that Twitter could presumably "fix" the dickbar by finding a way to make it 1)useful and 2) targeted to the user.

After years of Twitter claiming that they were going to find a way to monetize without resorting to irritating advertisements (and after billions of tweets) they presumably have the knowledge and ability to do this. The question really is, "do they want to"?

mcritz• 15 years ago

I've yet to find any use for trending topics generally. I prefer Favstar's quality curation based on most "faved" tweets by topic.

daimyoyo2• 15 years ago

I deleted the twitter app from my phone as soon as I realized the dickbar was something I couldn't opt out of. Now I use hootsuite. Deceit UI, multiple accounts, and I can post across accounts and(something twitter doesn't do) schedule tweets to post at a later time. Twitter had made a serious miscalculation with the dickbar. They've reminded users there are other clients out there they can use. And if twitter decides to shut off API access for those clients, a LARGE percentage of people will simply stop using the service. I will.

daimyoyo2• 15 years ago

And as an aside, according to http://www.techspot.com/news/40459-twitter-passes-myspace-in... twitter is storing 12TB of data per DAY! Anyone who cannot monetize that volume of data without annoying ads and dickbars doesn't belong in business.

rapind2• 15 years ago

Not that I disagree that they shouldn't be doing a better job with the dickbar thing, but analyzing 12TB of data per day and cross referencing it with petabytes of earlier data does actually seem very challenging. I can't think of too many companies currently doing this, so it's not like you can just google "how to data mine petabytes" to get a step by step tutorial.

jmspring• 15 years ago

I think part of the thing missing here with regard to the "dickbar" is "context". The short time I used the official Twitter client before changing to another one was that the "dickbar" had no relation to what I was actually interested in.

The UI was intrusive, yes, but what was presented was more offensive. Fix/soften the UI impact and make the "trending" topic more appropriate and things would be less offensive.

john2x• 15 years ago

I'm no iPhone user so I'm curious as to why this is such an issue? As far as I can tell it's just ads in a free app? (unless, it's not free then it makes more sense)

ceejayoz5• 15 years ago

Many of us paid for $3 Tweetie (and $3 for Tweetie 2) because it was by far the best Twitter client for iOS. It's free now, but we paid for it.

The statements from Twitter that people shouldn't build new Twitter clients coming out in the same week made the backlash worse, too.

nhangen3• 15 years ago

Meh...get over yourself Marco. Just because you aren't interested in these topics does not mean others are not. That's why they are trending in the first place.

ZitchDog• 15 years ago

He made a somewhat interesting point around this -- that even if you do hapen to be interested in a trending topic and select it, a bunch of mostly unrelated spamish tweets will be there to greet you when you select the topic.

nhangen3• 15 years ago

That happens on search.twitter.com also, so it's not limited to the trending topic bar.

ceejayoz5• 15 years ago

Sure, but Twitter should be able to fairly reliably detect that someone like Marco isn't interested in the global trends, and serve him stuff more likely to be of interest.

What Twitter's currently doing is akin to Google text ads on HN for Justin Bieber-themed desktop wallpapers - it's completely untargeted.

nhangen3• 15 years ago

There's a different between being a poor service and being offensive.

whoisnicole• 15 years ago

The "dickbar" is offensive because it needs to be. Costello knows that we'll hate whatever sneaky scheme to redirect our attention so he's probably giving us something to complain about first so that when they release the intended concept, it'll feel less offensive. Feeding ads into the stream would cause an uproar. Adding a banner will generate banner blindness. What better than to overlap the add with something we'd find useful but still sideband?

alexlawford• 15 years ago

I think that many of the same people offended by the Quick Bar would be the same people that are willing to (and often do) pay for a client. What reasons could Twitter have for being averse to a freemium model in this area of their business? $1/month to go advertising free? I'd pay it. Since they introduced it, I've always found the trending topics area of Twitter to be the worst thing about it. I, like so many others, object to having it stuck in my face every time I open their app.

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

That would be a huge mistake. Doing that kills the value of their product to advertisers. You've just taken away the customers most desirable to advertisers (those willing to spend money). Ad pricing falls off the cliff.

jasonkester• 15 years ago

It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse.

That actually sums up Twitter as a whole. Try as I might, I've never been able to shift my perception of Twitter beyond that and into something that could ever be useful to me in any way.

Look at the bottom 80% of those screenshots to see what the "real" twitter gives you. I can only assume that the author has subscribed to that content, and it's every bit as useless, to pretty much anybody.

revorad5• 15 years ago

"I think Twitter's a good thing. Why say a lot to a few people when you can say virtually nothing to everyone"

--Jerry Seinfeld

chrisaycock• 15 years ago

The best analogy I've heard of Twitter is it's like I were to stand on my balcony and shout at the crowd below.

robryan3• 15 years ago

For me the only appeal is connecting in line with my work and interests rather than my circle of friends and friends of friends on Facebook. If the kind of people I follow (use that losely I guess because I only look at it occasionally miss a heap of Tweets) moved to a platform which allowed longer form conversation and better image/video/link support I would have no problem moving on.

As it stands the threaded, no character limit format on hacker news is far better for getting insights on topics I care about than Twitter.

revorad5• 15 years ago

Look at those screenshots. The ad is nowhere near offensive. At most, it's slightly distracting.

The self-righteous sense of entitlement of people using free stuff on the internet never ceases to amaze me.

rahoulb• 15 years ago

Maybe not offensive. But definitely distracting and defeats the purpose of Twitter - which, for me at least, is to show me stuff I'm interested in.

Plus, it takes up a load of pixels on a device that is already short on screen space (a problem I have with all ad-supported mobile apps - I was quite happy to pay for Tweetie and I was quite happy to pay for Twitteriffic - and I am returning to using Twitteriffic full time).

ugh2• 15 years ago

I don’t think you read the article.

revorad5• 15 years ago

I did. What's your point?

tehjones• 15 years ago

"Am I supposed to tweet about it? If so, why doesn’t the interface encourage that? Even if I hit the (effectively invisible) New Tweet button from this screen, my tweet isn’t prepopulated with “#michigan”, so whatever I say in response won’t be included here."

The new tweet button is the same size and in the same place as in the rest of the application. Trying the button and it does auto fill the trending hash tag.

The rest of the article hits the point, but there is no need for these inaccuracies.

revorad5• 15 years ago

And imagine if the interface did encourage Marco to tweet about it. Then what would he say? "Why should I tweet about this crap? I'm double offended!!"

maurycy• 15 years ago

The whole thing is mind-blowing.

Shortly, Twitter should be more profitable than Google.

How Google makes money? More or less, they sell queries. They do not know the right price, so they let the market to figure it out. It works extremely well but they are able to flood someone with ads only about 10-20 times a day.

Twitter, on the other hand, is able to flood with ads all the time. Actually, they are able to push ads, instead of having to wait for a query. Twitter is able to auction with more "vectors", such as location, whole feed, followers etc. They do not have to do any information retrieval over this data, it is already provided with the structure.

Twitter does not have any privacy issues. It is already assumed that nearly everything you post on Twitter is public, so no one is going to screw them for using this. The data posted on Twitter is not sensitive, unlike Facebook.

Also, there is a huge value about the way they receive the data. They have a significant edge over the old web, as they get a lot of things before the whole world. What is even better, they do not have to pull this data, people push it to Twitter. They have data faster and they do not have costs related to crawling the web.

So, if for some reason they do not want flood people with ads, they are also able to auction immediate notifications about queries, the whole stream of tweets, some parts of it. They are able to set the minimum price of each auction so they offset their costs. Everyone focuses on Twitter as a marketing channel but there are many, very profitable, industries that live by the speed, die by the speed.

And do not get me started with the control they have over links posted in Tweets...

EDIT: typos

Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

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