

Twitter Deciding Whether Killing  '@' Symbol Will Bring Back 1 Billion  Users - RougeFemme
http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-axes-at-symbol-2014-3

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lauradhamilton
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+.

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Bpal
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?

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unreal37
If Twitter kills @, #, rt, mt ... that will be huge.

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ForHackernews
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.

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KingMob
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.

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ForHackernews
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.

