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.

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.

> 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).

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.

Knowing nothing about it, it seems to me that you could curate a semi-automatic solution pretty quickly.

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

It's the most obvious monetary play for Twitter that I can see. They know everything I like and don't like, people who I trust, topics I discuss, etc. If they could show targeted ads in that top bar I'd probably click on them like crazy.

Maybe they don't want to get into the targeted advertising market and see themselves more as general advertising? That said, you still don't see ads for women's lingerie during the World Series and you don't see many beer ads during Dancing with the Stars. There's a balance and I don't think twitter has it figured out yet.

As Marco points out, though, the #dickbar makes even less sense than running ads for women's lingerie during the World Series. The #dickbar is the equivalent of some guy standing behind home plate and holding up a sign that says #THONGS.

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).

>Maybe they don't want to get into the targeted advertising market and see themselves more as general advertising?

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?

>Netflix doesn't show me Spanish language movies.

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.

Try as well "Amorres Perros", "Jamon Jamon" (with Penelope Cruz!), and basically all of Almodóvar's movies. Well, maybe not "Mala education". For a more girly movie, "Lucia y el sexo" - not as girly as "The Notebook", and interesting and twisted in an unique Spanish way - definitely watch it with your girlfriend/boyfriend.

Surely "mouth-breathing buffoons" is short-hand for 'not my niche/circle of interest apes'.

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.

If you're on HN, you're probably a nerd, which means your Twitterstream (if you have one) is probably pretty interesting. Just for fun, click on the hashtag for any given trending topic. Note the (extraordinary) difference in quality, tone, and general signal:noise ratio.

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.

Great question...

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 wouldn't consider myself a power user so: I personally use twitter to embed a quick status update on my blog, or to put stream of consciousness thoughts every once in a while. Since I don't use mobile to do updates, I don't really see/mind this said "dickbar" though from how everyone is describing it, it sounds lame?

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.