Why hacks don't make great products - A critique of Twitter 4 for IOS | Hacker News Reader

Why hacks don't make great products - A critique of Twitter 4 for IOS

byte.org

8 pointsfreejack6 comments

I guess I must be a Twitter power user (I'm not really), but I find Twitter 4 to be excellently simplifying for my every-day usage of Twitter.

It gives me a timeline. I can quickly post a tweet.

It quickly shows me my @ conversations. It shows me who retweeted my stuff.

It shows a (much better) trending topics page. For the big important or interesting stuff I don't need to figure out what #santacon means, it has an explanation and a photo.

I don't use multiple Twitter accounts, so I can't comment on that.

And frankly, the entire premise of @ and # being hacks is absurd. The article seems to argue that these were ill-conceived work-arounds for features that Twitter was missing originally. Well, that may be so; however, Twitter is now defined by those features. Twitter without @ and # would be no Twitter at all. It turns out that using simple recognizable symbols to convey different meaning works extremely well in a 140 character medium.

@ and # may define Twitter, but there are simpler and more accessible means of addressing users and creating groups/topics categories.

Such as?

this thread seems to have nailed both grouping and addressing with nary an @ or a #. I'd say that was simple - I just hit reply.

and what about when you want to mention someone? will you reply to their profile? pick an arbitrary tweet? Twitter has a unique distributed, free-form environment where topics and interactions aren't aggregated in a page - it lets the users make these connections with @ and #

No, there are means to handle that as well. For instance, I could just invoke their username and let the software handle the linking and notification. Perhaps it needs a trigger like @ or not to separate regular conversation from usernames, but all the primitives are there. Facebook has some pretty decent tools in this area, so does Disqus. I'd also mention that there's a difference between using a special character as a trigger and building a UI around it. Its the latter that I'd argue Twitter needs to deal with as the current presentation is overly complex and not nearly relevant enough for the vast majority of users.

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