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."

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.

"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."

I'd assume it isn't that difficult to write a bot that autoposts with that hashtag each time a "trending topic" vaguely relevant to their area of business shows up. Certainly not compared with the SEO dance.

And if spammers are optimising their ads better than you..

You are probably right. But how, in that case, do Twitter monetize their service?

Did you read the comment?

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.

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.

--Jerry Seinfeld

As it stands the threaded, no character limit format on hacker news is far better for getting insights on topics I care about than Twitter.

Viewing the world through nerd-tinted spectacles makes many things seem horrible that are perfectly OK to a regular person.

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.

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).

(ie. Look, this guy follows Cisco's Datacenter Twitter account... let's show him stuff from Juniper's datacenter team, etc)

Methinks the first rule of running general advertising is to run advertising. Otherwise you are injecting noise for no reason. At least advertising is defensible noise ("hey, you want your free client, you gotta pay the piper") and it has a fighting chance of not actually being noise (some baseball fans do buy lingerie).

Then I think they completely missed the boat.

The whole conceit of twitter is _you decide_ who to follow. They don't even start you out with a Myspace-esque Tom. Every user's timeline is unique.

So, if I'm following Roger Ebert, Kevin Smith, and Netflix, don't you think I would be receptive to DVD advertisements? Similarly, if I'm following Pogue, Mossberg, and Gruber, wouldn't I be receptive to iPhone app ads?

That's too bad, because you're missing out on "The Sea Inside" and "Y tu mamá también".

Interestingly enough, Netflix does pitch foreign movies at me regularly.

We're all primates with our own monkey-sphere, and our inner circle of orangutans will be most important to us.

Some of us choose to read Daring Fireball (http://bit.ly/60LKTH) and follow John on twitter. But twitter is telling us in the most prominent position they have that we should be interested in this: http://bit.ly/1F5sWF.

You will realize that (a) Twitter can provide amazing filtration (b) this filter is 100% necessary and (c) the filter is exactly what the #dickbar undermines.

It's like an airplane engine that fails on purpose.

My guess is that each micro-demographic thinks of the other micro-demographics as 'buffoons' or perhaps 'horn-rimmed nerds'. If someone wanted to find out what the masses were enjoying, they'd be watching network TV instead.

I'd venture to say that there are many others like me who use different twitter apps (echofon for firefox, chromed bird, twitter tools for wordpress) who aren't affected. I can see how this could be pretty terrible for someone who exclusively uses twitter with mobile, though. Oh well.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The self-righteous sense of entitlement of people using free stuff on the internet never ceases to amaze me.

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).

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.

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"?

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.

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

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.

No means no

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.

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?

What Twitter's currently doing is akin to Google text ads on HN for Justin Bieber-themed desktop wallpapers - it's completely untargeted.

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.

It is a big problem and not just from an engineering standpoint. The same for facebook.

On the plus side, for competition at least, as hardware technology advances it'll become easier and cheaper to match twitter's capabilities with less effort.

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Twitter&btnG=Search+Pate...

Although they did make Loren Brichter patent "pull to refresh":

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Loren+Brichter&btnG=Sear...

Also, please don’t be "I could clone that in a weekend" guy. Everyone hates that guy.

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-ha...

You could make a piece of crap implementing Twitter’s models and create/read/update/delete in a weekend. Or really, in under an hour with Rails scaffolding. Congratulations, you have now proved that you can guess the schema from using an app. You don’t have a product, or even one tenth of a product.

First-past-the-post has nothing to do with Twitter’s success; polish and thought and sweating the details has everything to do with it.

Back to the topic, three months ago someone went ahead and pulled off a high-performance (no sure its scalability) Twitter clone in C. I recalled it's a good discussion on such a topic.

Discussion can be found on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/comments/f16mw/ive_never_been_impresse...

Its website is at http://blerg.dominionofawesome.com/

EDIT: moved "heavily qualified" to something more idiomatic.

But there's so much more that makes it more than just a technical problem. Ask your random 40-year-old working in a non-tech industry if they've heard of Twitter. Now ask them if they've heard of StatusNet or identi.ca.

In a nutshell, that is what makes it more than just a technical problem.

I don't know why your other post was downvoted, but probably because people think it's not an interesting question, could be determined by actually going to Google yourself and doing your own homework/search and most people don't feel like patents, if they exist, are the problem with twitter's dominance.

Also, your comments contribute what to this discussion?