Twitter Is Ditching the Egg (fastcodesign.com) 75
Long time reader and journalist harrymcc writes: In 2010, Twitter started representing new users with an icon of an egg. It was playful at the time, but the image has come to represent the worst of Twitter: trolls and bots. So the company is killing the egg. For Fast Company, I talked to Twitter's designers about their rationale for doing away with the well-known symbol, and the challenge of replacing it. From the article: The idea was that "eventually you'd crack out of an egg and become an amazing Twitter user," says senior manager of product design Bryan Haggerty, who worked on the project and recalls toying with the idea of even showing the hatching in progress. Nowadays, "the playfulness of Twitter is in the content our users are creating, versus how much the brand steps forward in the UI," says product designer Jen Cotton. Starting today, however, the egg is history. Twitter is dumping the tarnished icon for a new default profile picture -- a blobby silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, intentionally designed to represent a human without being concrete about gender, race, or any other characteristic. Everyone who's been an egg until now, whatever their rationale, will automatically switch over.
Eh? (Score:1)
So they replaced a generic placeholder with a generic placeholder.
This solves the problem how?
Re: (Score:3)
By solving the rampant alektorophobia that exists on the site.
Receive a reply which you disagree with? Is the users icon an egg? Rather than respond with "I disagree because ____!", simply dismiss them as an egg to tout your moral superiority.
I think I read a book about this [wikipedia.org] when I was a kid.
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Much easier. Set auto-ignore to include all eggs.
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alektorophobia
How many years have you been waiting for the opportunity to use that word?
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None, it is not an uncommon term to use on the twitter.
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So they replaced a generic placeholder with a generic placeholder.
Did you think the story about the trolls was the true one or is this a SJW gender battle inside Twitter? Eggs are female, after all.
Meanwhile, Facebook still insists on knowing if you're male or female when you sign up.
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Eggs are female?
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Yes, and if the idea is the egg hatched into a bird (their logo), clearly the egg is either gender neutral, or if it's hatching the twitter bird male (based on coloring).
I'd argue gender neutral though, as it was the egg hatching into the user as they mature.
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I guess that if you want to be pedantic, unfertilized eggs are female, but given that the point of the egg as represented on the twit farm was of a developing embryo that wasn't ready yet, calling eggs female is like calling fetuses female when clearly about half are not.
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Hey... It's a place for people who complain about check-marks being elitist.
Regular logic doesn't work there.
You can't burn through $2 Billion in losses (Score:5, Funny)
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Not egg, just Russian trolls and Russian bot armies. And don't forget the Russian Neo-Nazis, because that makes fucking sense.
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It is mostly a endless source of "articles" for lazy journalists. When there are no juicy tweets available, they can create articles from twitter itself. Fortunately the AI will soon replace these lazy ass writers, who just copy paste some crap from tweets into newspapers.
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It's a way for people to bypass publicists and other fairly expensive forms of communication with the press and with a fanbase without having to maintain one's own infrastructure like an e-mail distribution server. Its original novelty was that due to its character limit it was compatible with TAPP and SMS, so alphapagers and text messaging on even dumb phones could receive it, but that character limitation has helped to dumb-down the message.
As the AC above me has said, it's also a source for lazy journal
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Unfortunately for Twitter, there doesn't really seem to be a good way to monetize it.
Which is to say that they can make $700 million in revenue, which is more than enough to sustain operations, but they can't match Facebook or Google money.
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My first Troll rated comment!
It was more about Twitter not being relevant (except for one person).
Not as meaningful as my first +5 Insightful, but still worth remembering...
Excellent Idea (Score:2, Funny)
Ah yes, this will surely solve the problem with trolls and bots. It was totally because of the egg icon! I'm glad they rooted out the problem. Now that this is fixed, I'm sure they will start making money any second now.
Re:Excellent Idea (Score:4, Funny)
For shame.
This is the BEST news I could have hoped for today (Score:3)
No wait, I mean - WTF? THIS is considered not only news, but news for nerds?
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Twitter sockpuppetry (Score:2)
I haven't heard much out of Twitter [slashdot.org] since over a dozen of his sockpuppets were outed [slashdot.org].
I will never understand branding and marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
I just lack the words to describe exactly how I can convey this in a way that expresses incredulity, confusion, and its state of being a sheer bad idea.
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And here the message I always got from the default `egg' avatar was that they were calling their users eggheads.
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I don't know, it seems about as lucid and rational as any other left-wing "thinking".
okay (Score:2)
Sad! (Score:1)
In other words... (Score:3)
...instead of actually dealing with the trolls and bots, we're going to stop identifying them clearly.
Time to acknowledge reality (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they should just introduce a troll icon, and a bot icon, along with a rating system a la Slashdot. Once a user crosses a threshold on "Troll" or "Bot" ratings, their icon automatically gets changed to one or the other.
In fact, just create icons to go along with every rating category, and change their icon based on how a user is rated.
Actually, come to think of it, Slashdot IS hardened Twitter, without the popularity (or icons).
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Actually, come to think of it, Slashdot IS hardened Twitter, without the popularity (or icons).
Or unicode!
Human? What about the bots? (Score:3)
Forget the egg (Score:2)
Bah. (Score:2)
Some of us were birds before it was cool.
An egg by any other name (Score:2)
An egg by any other name, will smell just as rotten.
Say, that seems handy... (Score:2)
Say, that seems handy...
Can I block everyone using the default icon?
Amazing Twitter user? (Score:2)