Twitter Deciding Whether Killing '@' Symbol Will Bring Back 1 Billion Users

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-axes-at-symbol-2014-3

by RougeFemme • 12 years ago

5 6 12 years ago

Bpal• 12 years ago

Hashtags and @s are the features that make twitter such a valuable marketing tool. How do they plan to group the news and twitter trends?

unreal37• 12 years ago

If Twitter kills @, #, rt, mt ... that will be huge.

ForHackernews2• 12 years ago

Good. Lumping together data and metadata has always been a bad idea.

I still say Twitter is a fad. Nothing it offers is a unique value proposition. If the right clique of celebrities moved on to some new, more fashionable network, that would be the end of Twitter.

KingMob• 12 years ago

Twitter itself may be a fad, but there's still a need for some kind of light-weight, small, broadcast mechanism.

If this had been done decades ago, we'd have an RFC and it would be a distributed protocol like email. Instead we have a single company dictating terms, for better or worse.

ForHackernews2• 12 years ago

Maybe it's not too late? We need more protocols and fewer "platforms". Is anyone working on writing such a protocol?

The problem is getting somebody to implement and support it. XMPP has suffered because companies refuse to federate, and keep trying to build in their own proprietary extensions.

lauradhamilton• 12 years ago

I think they're going about this the wrong way.

The primary problem they should be trying to solve is that it's fairly tough for a new user to join the ecosystem, get his friends to follow him, etc.

It's difficult for a new content-creator to get started. Much harder than with Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google+.

Twitter Deciding Whether Killing '@' Symbol Will Bring Back 1 Billion Users

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