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

Marco nails it.<p>The whole value proposition of Twitter, historically, has been that you can make it <i>whatever you would like it to be</i>. 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.<p>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!<p>Sports? Celebrities? Hell. No.<p>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:<p>"Wow, glad Twitter rethought that garbage and built something that truly worked for both users and advertisers. What a powerhouse they are."<p>"Twitter? Was that like Friendster or something? I think I remember it."

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.<p>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.

<i>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.</i><p>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.<p>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.

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 <i>like</i> this UI feature.<p>Viewing the world through nerd-tinted spectacles makes many things seem horrible that are perfectly OK to a regular person.

The funny thing is, clients like Twitterrific and Tweetie pre-Twitter takeover managed to figure out how to monetize the client years ago.<p>The Fusion Ads that were featured on Twitter in particular were excellent -- I actually found some the ads interesting enough to click on.

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.

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).<p>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.

"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."<p>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.<p>The rest of the article hits the point, but there is no need for these inaccuracies.

The whole thing is mind-blowing.<p>Shortly, Twitter should be more profitable than Google.<p>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.<p>Twitter, on the other hand, is able to flood with ads all the time. Actually, they are able to <i>push</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>pull</i> this data, people <i>push</i> it to Twitter. They have data faster and they do not have costs related to crawling the web.<p>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.<p>And do not get me started with the control they have over links posted in Tweets...<p>EDIT: typos

Look at those screenshots. The ad is nowhere near offensive. At most, it's slightly distracting.<p>The self-righteous sense of entitlement of people using free stuff on the internet never ceases to amaze me.

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?

What I find interesting about this analysis is the fact that Twitter <i>could</i> presumably "fix" the dickbar by finding a way to make it 1)useful and 2) targeted to the user.<p>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"?

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.<p>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.

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"<p>No means no

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).

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

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

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.

Is the sms -&#62; internet/ server -&#62; 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?