

Why hacks don't make great products - A critique of Twitter 4 for IOS - freejack
http://www.byte.org/2011/12/10/things-i-dont-like-about-twitter-4-for-ios/

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amackera
I guess I must be a Twitter power user (I'm not really), but I find Twitter 4
to be excellently simplifying for my every-day usage of Twitter.

It gives me a timeline. I can quickly post a tweet.

It quickly shows me my @ conversations. It shows me who retweeted my stuff.

It shows a (much better) trending topics page. For the big important or
interesting stuff I don't need to figure out what #santacon means, it has an
explanation and a photo.

I don't use multiple Twitter accounts, so I can't comment on that.

And frankly, the entire premise of @ and # being hacks is absurd. The article
seems to argue that these were ill-conceived work-arounds for features that
Twitter was missing originally. Well, that may be so; however, Twitter is now
_defined_ by those features. Twitter without @ and # would be no Twitter at
all. It turns out that using simple recognizable symbols to convey different
meaning works extremely well in a 140 character medium.

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freejack
@ and # may define Twitter, but there are simpler and more accessible means of
addressing users and creating groups/topics categories.

~~~
rue
Such as?

~~~
freejack
this thread seems to have nailed both grouping and addressing with nary an @
or a #. I'd say that was simple - I just hit reply.

~~~
joshma
and what about when you want to mention someone? will you reply to their
profile? pick an arbitrary tweet? Twitter has a unique distributed, free-form
environment where topics and interactions aren't aggregated in a page - it
lets the users make these connections with @ and #

~~~
freejack
No, there are means to handle that as well. For instance, I could just invoke
their username and let the software handle the linking and notification.
Perhaps it needs a trigger like @ or not to separate regular conversation from
usernames, but all the primitives are there. Facebook has some pretty decent
tools in this area, so does Disqus. I'd also mention that there's a difference
between using a special character as a trigger and building a UI around it.
Its the latter that I'd argue Twitter needs to deal with as the current
presentation is overly complex and not nearly relevant enough for the vast
majority of users.

