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

marco.org

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

#71

Post by bryanh »

danilocampos wrote: post #32

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 tha…

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.

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

#72

Post by danilocampos »

bryanh wrote: post #71
danilocampos wrote: post #32

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 tha…

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…

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."

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

#73

Post by bryanh »

rapind wrote: post #52
daimyoyo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You are very right. But, why not start simple and just lump people in broad categories based on follows.

Jessica follows a lot of celebrities. Bryan follows lots of tech icons. Billy follows lots of comedians. Etc. Etc.

Even that isn't easy but it is hundreds of times more likely to work than blanket ads and last I heard they have millions in VC money. Spend it on talent specifically for this.

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

#74

Post by bryanh »

danilocampos wrote: post #72
bryanh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

How many dozens of Twitter NLP companies for tracking brands are there? Twitter should buy their favorite, and offer brand reinforcement and steal-away ads. Better already.

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

#75

Post by johns »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #38
daveman692 wrote: post #14

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.

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 Twit…

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.

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

#77

Post by jasonkester »

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.

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

#78

Post by ovi256 »

officemonkey wrote: post #48
Duff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

Try as well "Amorres Perros", "Jamon Jamon" (with Penelope Cruz!), and basically all of Almodóvar's movies. Well, maybe not "Mala education". For a more girly movie, "Lucia y el sexo" - not as girly as "The Notebook", and interesting and twisted in an unique Spanish way - definitely watch it with your girlfriend/boyfriend.

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

#80

Post by tehjones »

"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.

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