Twitter for iPhone users, rejoice: the #dickbar is dead.
Officially called the QuickBar, it was nicknamed in honour of Twitter boss Dick Costolo.
It was supposed to be a discovery tool for Twitter users – a way for them to find out what’s happening, to see trending topics and sponsored tweets.
There was only one small problem: pretty much everyone hated it.
The reviews on the iOS App Store changed overnight from glowing to scathing: “You don’t have a clue what your users want!” said one.
“Get rid of that stupid trending bar, or at least allow me to disable it,” said another. They were the polite ones. A lot of others were much more direct.
A week or so ago, Marco Arment posted a detailed critique of the bar. It wasn’t just that it annoyed people, he said; the problem was that it was just really bad.
“I see, from top to bottom: intentional spam, unintentional spam, and a random person’s frivolous, meaningless tweet about sports that I don’t care about. (I scrolled down and it only got worse.) I guess Michigan is a trending topic because something important happened with a Michigan sports team. What am I supposed to do with this information?
Good question.
The criticisms and the terrible App Store customer reviews have clearly hit home. As of today, the #dickbar is dead.
Don’t expect Twitter to give up, though. It still has to find ways to make money. In a public mea culpa post on the Twitter blog, Twitter’s creative director Doug Bowman wrote:
“We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.”
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
14 responses to “Twitter Kills The #dickbar”
It really sucks to see nearly everyone hate a feature that’s put into an app :(.
C’mon. No mention of the twizzler patch for jailbroken phone which removed it? Hoe about a version number where it was removed. Lame…
lol so ads are now a feature. Wake me when its time for reality again.
They could have just as easily made it an optional feature.
i liked the concept of a top bar that perhaps showed the public timeline or top trending topics or even both. But as a user choice. I could leave it off, turn it on and pick what was shown etc.
I actually enjoyed it. It gave me more of a sense what was trending quickly and was able to make a choice if I wanted to see more. It should be a an optional turn on / turn off
Arment’s comments were right though. Since the quickbar was here, I clicked on a few items to see why they were trending near me – and most of the tweets were useless or nonsense – pretty much having almost nothing to do with the hashtag. (never mind the nonsensical hashtags themselves – ‘trending’ does not mean ‘worthwhile’. )