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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

#41

Post by daimyoyo »

daimyoyo wrote: post #39

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 decide…

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.

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

#42

Post by kajecounterhack »

DanI-S wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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

#43

Post by mechanical_fish »

zecho wrote: post #37
Skroob wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they don't want to get into the targeted advertising market and see themselves more as general advertising? That said, you still don't see ads for women's lingerie during the World Series and you don't see many beer ads during Dancing with the Stars. There's a balance and I don't think twitter has it figured out yet.

As Marco points out, though, the #dickbar makes even less sense than running ads for women's lingerie during the World Series. The #dickbar is the equivalent of some guy standing behind home plate and holding up a sign that says #THONGS.

Methinks the first rule of running general advertising is to run advertising. Otherwise you are injecting noise for no reason. At least advertising is defensible noise ("hey, you want your free client, you gotta pay the piper") and it has a fighting chance of not actually being noise (some baseball fans do buy lingerie).

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

#44

Post by slig »

Skroob wrote: post #33
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.

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.

> Why shouldn't Twitter target trends at me?

Maybe they can't. They sure lack some core competence by not being able to block obvious spam accounts (Newly created accounts that: posts trend spam, do mass following and mass @mention, etc).

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

#45

Post by cygwin98 »

jonursenbach wrote: post #15
pavel_lishin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

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

I don't think this will be an issue if he manages to maintain the same API as Twitter.

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

#46

Post by bonzoesc »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
forkandwait wrote: post #10

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

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?

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.

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

#47

Post by dreyfiz »

forkandwait wrote: post #3

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?

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.

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

#48

Post by officemonkey »

Duff wrote: post #31
DanI-S wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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

#49

Post by flyosity »

Skroob wrote: post #33
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.

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.

It's the most obvious monetary play for Twitter that I can see. They know everything I like and don't like, people who I trust, topics I discuss, etc. If they could show targeted ads in that top bar I'd probably click on them like crazy.

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

#50

Post by cygwin98 »

forkandwait wrote: post #3

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?

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/

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