Twitter Turns 8; May Drop Hashtags and @replies 96
Twitter has only just turned eight years old, but in that time it's become so pervasive that some of its conventions have spread beyond Twitter itself, and its character limit seems almost like a natural law. Now, Buzzfeed reports that some Twitter-isms may be about to change: based on screenshots of interfaces in alpha testing, it seems that hashtags and "at" replies may be on the chopping block, or (based on some updates made to the story) at least made less visible for some readers.
Let the April Fools jokes begin... (Score:2)
:D
Re:Let the April Fools jokes begin... (Score:5, Funny)
@JMJimmy whatever do you mean? #confused #irony
Sock puppetry (Score:2)
Natural law? (Score:5, Interesting)
Up the character limit to 160 to harmonize with SMS.
Re:Natural law? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Natural law? (Score:5, Funny)
tl;dr shld b 32 chr max #attnspn
Re:Natural law? (Score:4, Funny)
ur #fullofit #20ftw!
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Remove all of the site's character in a redesign (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure sounds like another site I heard of recently where the users got upset about people stripping away the things that made the site the site.
Re:Remove all of the site's character in a redesig (Score:4, Informative)
You forgot to say #FUCKBETA.
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The hashtag was stripped to streamline the comment and hide the scaffolding.
Re:Remove all of the site's character in a redesig (Score:5, Funny)
Sure sounds like another site I heard of recently where the users got upset about people stripping away the things that made the site the site.
Digg?
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Yes, popular things can have shitty interfaces and their popularity can hide that fact from the creators.
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Like many other people, I have been using TweetDeck on the desktop for years. When it was acquired by Twitter a couple of years ago, they managed to completely mess it up.
Now, things that one used to be able to do right in a column of TweetDeck (i.e., more or less in-line), requires 4 different interfaces that pop up. Search is another (completely superfluous) interface
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The only reason I still use TweetDeck is because Twitter managed to kill off the competing products by limiting their API calls. That's called anti-competitive Bad Business.)
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"Again proving what a moron you are."
When I see them, I have to wonder what the motivation of the writer was.
Publicly denouncing me? Not very effective; not only does it not have anything specific to say, it's a zero-point AC comment.
Just pissed off at me? Again not very effective; it's hard to tell who it is behind the AC mask. (Sometimes I can tell, but that comment left few clues.)
About the only other thing I can think of is "projection" or Dunning-Kruger. But even if it were the latter
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Twitter killing off... itself (Score:5, Insightful)
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Twitter is social media for retards......
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You know, I used to think that. Facebook is a lot worse than Twitter when it comes to the 'tard community. Plus, you've got people with their hand out, asking to be your "friend" and I really don't like that.
Plus, Facebook is so intrusive. Twitter is more useful because you can be anonymous and just be a listener, if you prefer.
I'm not a big fan of the "social" aspect of social media. Now that there seems to be an all-out attack on RSS by publishers, Twitter is a very good way to follow news.
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"I'm not a big fan of the "social" aspect of social media. Now that there seems to be an all-out attack on RSS by publishers, Twitter is a very good way to follow news."
Twitter as an idea, and as a service, IS good. What is bad -- and what people are complaining about -- is the implementation of that idea. Twitter, the company, is just plain bad at it. Their software -- and perhaps more importantly, the interface to their software -- is downright terrible.
I can summarize the basic problem with Twitter (the company) in few words: they try to make their users do what they want, rather than they doing what their users want. It's a practice that has never worked in the long
Re: Twitter killing off... itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like anything, it's all in how you use it.
Twitter is a great source of breaking information, in a nearly endless number of ways.
Yeah, if you use it to follow folks that use it as a "microblog" to tell you what they had for lunch, just like FB, I can see your point. But if you subscribe to the right feeds, you can get some amazing content - and opportunities. I've tweeted back and forth with several of my favorite celebrities (while it may seem silly, to this gay boy exchanging tweets with Cher at 2am one late night awhile back made my year). Another time I was traveling somewhere and because I had subbed to a few local feeds I found out about - and was selected as one of the winners of - a local contest which got me in the back door of a theme park at midnight to be in the first group to ride a brand new headliner attraction over and over all night at a private party (best damn brownie sundae I ever had at the desert bar, too, LOL).
Sure, those are not so typical (and admittedly vapid) examples, but you get the idea - the mobile friendly nature, the immediacy, and the ability to follow feeds without having to "friend" people is really great for timely information for everything from silly things like the above to people trying to stay in contact in a literal war zone.
Just like I've leveraged FB in more ways than I can ever count for opportunities or finding (or giving) help on various projects from old friends I haven't seen in person in a decade or more, and simply to keep in touch with folks I'd never see again otherwise (I love that when I travel I can just go to FB, see who I know there, and can connect with folks in practically any city I visit, either socially or just for advice), Twitter is really great if you learn how to use it well. I come from a small town, and one of the things you learn growing up in one is who to go for and why - if I needed my car fixed, or help locating a research article, or who to ask about the best new restaurants in the area - it's really sweet when you can be a part of a local network like that because it makes life so much easier - and more enjoyable. That's what Twitter - and FB - do, they just expand them on a global scale.
It's all in learning how to make it work to the best advantage - if all you do is follow asshats who make a tweet every time they take a shit, sure, it's garbage - but there is so much more there for the taking, and sharing, if you go at it from a different mindset.
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It's hard and really annoying to read conversations on Twitter. And the character limit means that people have to break their messages into several tweets, which again makes following the conversation harder.
Re: Twitter killing off... itself (Score:5, Funny)
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Woah there... your hearing aid battery must be going out.
You are the exception (Score:1)
While you are one of the rare twitter enthusiasts that can actually give examples of how twitter has been useful (most say it is useful, but can never think of an example), I think you are leaving out the endless hours you spent sorting through all the garbage to find something worth talking about. . What the creators of Twitter are trying to resolve is a problem that is inherent to the service, it is a huge time investment for very little return. The issue isn't learning how to use the service; the twitter
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Twitter is social media for retards......
yes its lucky that slashdot is retard free .......
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How much do you want to bet that the twits will just keep on hash tagging everything?
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Look into IRC some day and you will see "twitter" implemented right (and they did use those @ and # chars long before twitter perverted their usage ;-)
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I _wish_ this would work, but App.net tried so very hard, and put together a nice service - everything you could want, and it's made very little headway.
The real issue is this: Twitter has your friends. You can walk away from a service, but switching services means you're walking away from your friends, and most won't do that.
Twitter is sucking more and more, and will probably lose me at some point. But realistically, not yet.
We can change this! (Score:2, Funny)
#savethehashtag
Re:We can change this! (Score:5, Funny)
#downwithhashtags
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What network are these channels on, I'd like to support the cause!
Only thing I hate about Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
The most common use of a Twitpic is to post a meme. And if that isn't bad enough, the second most common use of Twitpic is to post a shock picture. It is unacceptable that we can't have them disabled in the options.
Re:Only thing I hate about Twitter (Score:4, Informative)
Greasemonkey [mozilla.org] to the rescue!
http://userscripts.org/scripts... [userscripts.org]
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or adblock them. you can get an expression, which blocks the images, only on collapsed tweets
Re:Only thing I hate about Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
Hashtag and At are just a condensed form of markup. They are useful for entry of tweets but completely unnecessary for displaying them.
Re:Only thing I hate about Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
Hashtag and At are just a condensed form of markup. They are useful for entry of tweets but completely unnecessary for displaying them.
Except they make it readily apparent how to compose a tweet -- even for new users. #dying
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Agh, my kingdom for a mod point. This is a very very good point that gets almost no play.
In other news (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot might be removing comments. Or at least replacing threaded discussions with flat 255-character one-liner responses, with no HTML markup features.
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no, real news aggregators exist and are superior, twitter ones are far too disorganized
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News aggregators have become much less useful thanks to the all-out war on RSS that we're seeing from publishers and news sources.
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aw, some twitter twat moderators got butthurt
they think facebook and twitter are news sources, ha
The alternative headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Twitter turns 8; seeks free advertising
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Slashdot is gullible trash since Dice bought it, gives twitter free advertising.
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Twitter needs to be advertised?
Profit? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Build Twitter with features people love.
2. Remove said features infuriating the masses.
3. Re-introduce said features as a premium feature.
4. Profit?
Nothing else seems to be working for them...
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2. Remove said features infuriating the masses.
I still believe that the old Twitter way of showing your replies to other people in your feed by default was much, much more organic and useful and at the time most people seemed to agree. The .@ thing is a hack to get around that stupid change.
But ... I was complaining about this when Twitter ran on Fail Whale, errr, I mean Ruby and now it's tremendously successful so at least some of their success is not dependent on what they users say they want.
Were we wro
Buzzfeed? (Score:5, Informative)
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Buzzfeed is in my hosts file, so I don't need to worry about clicking on anything!
Sounds like a marketing gimmick (Score:3)
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Like New Coke and Slash Beta.
Fuck them and the horses they rode in on.
D.U.M.B. (Score:2)
How could they eliminate hashtags, other than not allowing non alphanumeric characters? What's going to stop someone from putting a "#" in front of a word or phrase?
They'd have to make their search engine ignore the hash mark, which is just dumb.
Didn't the "hashtag" made them what they are? (Score:2)
I dont use twitter so i could be wrong, but if you remove one of their key foundations, what is left?
I'm a twitter Luddite. (Score:4, Interesting)
I still don't get twitter.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
Now get off my lawn.
Yeah, right.... (Score:1)
Why not just shutdown the site? I would hurt less, and the results will be exactly the same.
First World Problems: (Score:2)
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ok...so what now? (Score:1)
When I first heard about this I wondered how or what they replace them with, but really don't care much ether way.
Windows 8 app (Score:2)
I hope it doesn't end up like the stupid Facebook (Score:2)
The Daniel Waternam
The danger of Missie Marks
The the danger of misleading Commie Pinko
Obvs (Score:2)
Growth problem is not syntantic (Score:2)
I actually got banned for a day for "over-replying", not to one person mind you, but just in general. Replying to peoples tweets is apparently disruptive, funny as I thought it was the point and that I was participating.
It's a social networking site that doesn't encourage social behavior, unless it pleases, and puffs-up the poster.
The site is ridiculous as anything but a corporate announcement site -- and this is why it's going to ultimately fail. My guess is that it will be dominated by "news" and product