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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

#81

Post by revorad »

tehjones wrote: post #80

"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. T…

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!!"

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

#82

Post by revorad »

jasonkester wrote: post #77

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…

"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

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

#83

Post by rahoulb »

revorad wrote: post #79

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.

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).

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

#84

Post by ugh »

revorad wrote: post #79

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.

I don’t think you read the article.

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

#85

Post by revorad »

ugh wrote: post #84
revorad wrote: post #79

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.

I don’t think you read the article.

I did. What's your point?

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

#87

Post by revorad »

ugh wrote: post #86
revorad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did. What's your point?

Ok, then, where is the entitlement you are sensing? I couldn’t find any.

He's raising a stink about a company's (poor) attempt at making money by causing its users the slightest inconvenience. That ad uses what, less than 10% of the screen space? Now, you can criticise how bad or ineffective the ads are. But, no, the dude is offended! He feels entitled to get even more from Twitter than what he's paying for, which is $0.

It's like if I got offended for Instapaper charging money for a premium subscription. No, I'm just grateful Marco's built an amazingly useful tool and is letting me use it for free. I'm not entitled to more than that.

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

#88

Post by mryall »

johns wrote: post #75
mechanical_fish wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, folks at my company follow discussions about our products on Twitter and it doesn't matter whether the person uses a hashtag or not. What you need is a distinct product name though, to only discover relevant tweets.

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

#89

Post by khafra »

cabalamat wrote: post #58
alnayyir wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. 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?

I must admit I did miss that part of it blush

To be fair, that was over 140 characters into the comment.

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

#90

Post by rapind »

bryanh wrote: post #73
rapind wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's definitely something they should be focusing on.
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