
Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive - starnix17
http://www.marco.org/3991237704
======
danilocampos
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 that needlessly undermines
Twitter's brand and utility among the fiercest of its loyalists. 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. Pitch me awesome
iDevice accessories and apps all day long – I bet I'd actually care about
them. Design sites? I'll check it out! Magic kitchen tools? Where?! Awesome
restaurants near me? I will eat there!

Sports? Celebrities? Hell. No.

This is crass and it's a fuck up, plain and simple. Five years from now we'll
look back and one of two things will be on our minds:

"Wow, glad Twitter rethought that garbage and built something that truly
worked for both users and advertisers. What a powerhouse they are."

"Twitter? Was that like Friendster or something? I think I remember it."

~~~
bryanh
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.

~~~
danilocampos
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."

~~~
bryanh
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.

~~~
Luc
What's NLP? Google didn't help - unless it stands for 'Neuro-Linguistic
Programming'...

~~~
svmegatron
Natural Language Processing, I think

~~~
thienan
thanks

------
Aaronontheweb
It's not just the dickbar that's offensive - it's the fact that its release
along with the announcement that Twitter is going to try to limit the
development of other clients against their API that really makes it
distasteful.

I understand that they have a need to monetize - I get it, but to do so in
such a ham-handed way really bothers me.

~~~
robryan
Was just thinking about this, it would be great if they did do targeted
advertising and did it through an API, so 3rd party clients could choose to
include ads and both Twitter and the 3rd party takes a cut, or allow them to
continue without advertising but ban other advertising meaning that they can
only monetise by selling the app or including Twitter ads.

~~~
Aaronontheweb
I think this is an AWESOME idea.

------
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.

~~~
revorad
"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

~~~
chrisaycock
The best analogy I've heard of Twitter is it's like I were to stand on my
balcony and shout at the crowd below.

------
DanI-S
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.

~~~
Duff
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.

~~~
Skroob
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.

~~~
slig
> 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).

~~~
ceejayoz
I'd love to hear someone from Twitter explain why the service seems to lack
even basic automated spam detection. The only mechanism that seems to exist is
the "report as spam", which takes so long to suspend an account I wouldn't be
surprised if the process was manual.

------
Duff
The funny thing is, clients like Twitterrific and Tweetie pre-Twitter takeover
managed to figure out how to monetize the client years ago.

The Fusion Ads that were featured on Twitter in particular were excellent -- I
actually found some the ads interesting enough to click on.

------
daveman692
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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
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 Twitter. And
I have learned that, to a marketer, hashtags are pure heroin. You get to
eavesdrop on strangers discussing products. You can count references to your
product, and to your competitors' products. So what if this activity bears the
same relationship to actually getting out of the building that playing Rock
Band does to a real blues jam? It's a rush, and it comes in optimal tiny doses
like Snackwell cookies, and it almost feels like productive work. From what I
can tell a majority of the marketers in the world have Tweetdeck open all the
time and wince reflexively every time anybody on Twitter says anything bad
about their pet trademarks. To ask them to do otherwise is like asking a
novelist to stop compulsively reloading their Amazon sales rank over and over.

~~~
johns
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.

~~~
mryall
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.

~~~
robryan
Hashtags make it easier, sometimes people don't provide enough context or use
the same words you would for a product or service, if people start using a
common hashtag it makes it a lot easier.

An example of this that I used a bit in my thesis (admittedly not product
based) was the #ausvotes hashtag for the Australian elections. There were
plenty of Tweets that would have been very hard to identify as related to the
election without that hashtag because they were mostly thoughts or opinions
without context.

------
bartjacobs
I agree with Marco Arment and Jeff Rock in that it is perfectly understandable
that Twitter wants to monetize their business if they wish to do so, but based
on their recent decisions it seems that they are taking a path that will
damage their business along the way. Also, I have never understood the value
of trending topics. It is just one of the many metrics inherent to how Twitter
works, but it is far from the most useful metric since Twitter is so full of
spam and people that have nothing useful to say (which is their good right of
course).

Anyway, all this does make me curious to see how Twitter is going to change in
the next few months and I hope for the best - for them and for the users.

------
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.

~~~
revorad
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!!"

------
maurycy
The whole thing is mind-blowing.

Shortly, Twitter should be more profitable than Google.

How Google makes money? More or less, they sell queries. They do not know the
right price, so they let the market to figure it out. It works extremely well
but they are able to flood someone with ads only about 10-20 times a day.

Twitter, on the other hand, is able to flood with ads all the time. Actually,
they are able to _push_ ads, instead of having to wait for a query. Twitter is
able to auction with more "vectors", such as location, whole feed, followers
etc. They do not have to do any information retrieval over this data, it is
already provided with the structure.

Twitter does not have any privacy issues. It is already assumed that nearly
everything you post on Twitter is public, so no one is going to screw them for
using this. The data posted on Twitter is not sensitive, unlike Facebook.

Also, there is a huge value about the way they receive the data. They have a
significant edge over the old web, as they get a lot of things before the
whole world. What is even better, they do not have to _pull_ this data, people
_push_ it to Twitter. They have data faster and they do not have costs related
to crawling the web.

So, if for some reason they do not want flood people with ads, they are also
able to auction immediate notifications about queries, the whole stream of
tweets, some parts of it. They are able to set the minimum price of each
auction so they offset their costs. Everyone focuses on Twitter as a marketing
channel but there are many, very profitable, industries that live by the
speed, die by the speed.

And do not get me started with the control they have over links posted in
Tweets...

EDIT: typos

------
revorad
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.

~~~
ugh
I don’t think you read the article.

~~~
revorad
I did. What's your point?

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

~~~
revorad
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.

~~~
stringbot
He didn't raise a stink about Twitter trying to monetize, he raised a stink
about them making a well-designed app ugly and less relevant to its users.

------
whoisnicole
The "dickbar" is offensive because it needs to be. Costello knows that we'll
hate whatever sneaky scheme to redirect our attention so he's probably giving
us something to complain about first so that when they release the intended
concept, it'll feel less offensive. Feeding ads into the stream would cause an
uproar. Adding a banner will generate banner blindness. What better than to
overlap the add with something we'd find useful but still sideband?

------
icarus_drowning
What I find interesting about this analysis is the fact that Twitter _could_
presumably "fix" the dickbar by finding a way to make it 1)useful and 2)
targeted to the user.

After years of Twitter claiming that they were going to find a way to monetize
without resorting to irritating advertisements (and after billions of tweets)
they presumably have the knowledge and ability to do this. The question really
is, "do they want to"?

------
daimyoyo
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 decides to shut off API access
for those clients, a LARGE percentage of people will simply stop using the
service. I will.

~~~
daimyoyo
And as an aside, according to [http://www.techspot.com/news/40459-twitter-
passes-myspace-in...](http://www.techspot.com/news/40459-twitter-passes-
myspace-in-traffic-adds-12tb-of-data-per-day.html) 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.

~~~
rapind
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.

~~~
bryanh
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.

~~~
rapind
It's definitely something they should be focusing on.

------
alexlawford
I think that many of the same people offended by the Quick Bar would be the
same people that are willing to (and often do) pay for a client. What reasons
could Twitter have for being averse to a freemium model in this area of their
business? $1/month to go advertising free? I'd pay it. Since they introduced
it, I've always found the trending topics area of Twitter to be the worst
thing about it. I, like so many others, object to having it stuck in my face
every time I open their app.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
That would be a huge mistake. Doing that kills the value of their product to
advertisers. You've just taken away the customers most desirable to
advertisers (those willing to spend money). Ad pricing falls off the cliff.

------
john2x
I'm no iPhone user so I'm curious as to why this is such an issue? As far as I
can tell it's just ads in a free app? (unless, it's not free then it makes
more sense)

~~~
ceejayoz
Many of us paid for $3 Tweetie (and $3 for Tweetie 2) because it was by far
the best Twitter client for iOS. It's free now, but we paid for it.

The statements from Twitter that people shouldn't build new Twitter clients
coming out in the same week made the backlash worse, too.

------
dr_
Maybe the bar should only appear when one conducts a search - so it could have
some relevance to what is being searched - rather than right on the main
screen.

------
jmspring
I think part of the thing missing here with regard to the "dickbar" is
"context". The short time I used the official Twitter client before changing
to another one was that the "dickbar" had no relation to what I was actually
interested in.

The UI was intrusive, yes, but what was presented was more offensive.
Fix/soften the UI impact and make the "trending" topic more appropriate and
things would be less offensive.

------
ALXfoo
Not just that, with the new update every time you launch the iPhone app it
asks you "Twitter would like to use your current location, allow, don't allow"

No means no

~~~
robc
That's interesting. The alert should only be presented to you twice - if you
respond No to both cases, it should simply disable location services for the
app.

Mind you, I did that manually - at least once I discovered it leaves them
enabled the whole time the app's running, which means a significant battery
hit on the GPS.

------
davidedicillo
Marco totally nailed it. At this point I'd rather something adsense-like that
can push ads I could be interested in (possibly with the quality of the Fusion
or Deck ads).

------
mcritz
I've yet to find any use for trending topics generally. I prefer Favstar's
quality curation based on most "faved" tweets by topic.

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

~~~
pavel_lishin
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?

~~~
bonzoesc
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.

------
nhangen
Meh...get over yourself Marco. Just because you aren't interested in these
topics does not mean others are not. That's why they are trending in the first
place.

~~~
ZitchDog
He made a somewhat interesting point around this -- that even if you do hapen
to be interested in a trending topic and select it, a bunch of mostly
unrelated spamish tweets will be there to greet you when you select the topic.

~~~
nhangen
That happens on search.twitter.com also, so it's not limited to the trending
topic bar.

------
forkandwait
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?

~~~
pavel_lishin
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_.

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

~~~
cygwin98
I don't think this will be an issue if he manages to maintain the same API as
Twitter.

~~~
ceejayoz
How many Twitter clients support third-party API endpoints?

~~~
tofumatt
Ironically, I believe Tweetie 2 used to, before Twitter bought it. It allowed
a lot of advanced customization.

~~~
ceejayoz
It actually still does, for now. I wonder if the #dickbar shows up on third-
party timelines...

