Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Is Ditching the Egg (fastcodesign.com)
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.
So they replaced a generic placeholder with a generic placeholder.
This solves the problem how?
Without breaking a few eggs.
Other than Donald's way of annoying everyone.
Seriously?
BlameBillCosby.com
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.
No wait, I mean - WTF? THIS is considered not only news, but news for nerds?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Nerds like to argue about how stupid news can be, so yes, news for nerds.
love is just extroverted narcissism
*shrug*
But it's not stuff that matters
But this concept: "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."
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.
The takeaway here is that all the cool eggs will make themselves eggs again.
that TWITter is for TWITS!
Neither is 99% of the shit nerds like to talk about.
It's important to us nerfs xD
Their ability to keep on running at a loss is astounding.
Twitter is full of Nazi bigots who try to shake people down for their beliefs. SJWs will be the end of this country. They should all move to California.
what a fucking idiotic and useless way t9 communicate
Sad!
'Doucher' complete with a wet steaming turd icon for all newbies, and eventually having an animated 'cleaning' process, wherein a tiny human appears out of the mass of fecal matter and slowly cleans themselves off to become a model social network member.
I think it would provide the double benefit of giving new users a reason to learn netiquette, as well as helping to elicit imagery suitable of Twitter's business plan, future prospects, and general community quality at this time. Who knows, maybe they will prove you CAN polish a turd.
Because who cares
Beware of genericity. The "a blobby silhouette of a person's head and shoulders" better not look anything like the "a blobby silhouette of a person's head and shoulders" that Microsoft uses in unpersonalized Office365 accounts or risk the ire of the pack of rabid lawyers.
...instead of actually dealing with the trolls and bots, we're going to stop identifying them clearly.
-Styopa
People are ditching the fascist censored platform known as twitter, in droves.
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).
Aren't half the Twitter users simply bots? That the new icon is a human silhouette sounds like wishful thinking to me. So does the silhouette fill in to become a robot once the user has demonstrated enough bot-like activity?
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
" 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."
Come on that's obviously biased against people without heads, how could Twitter be so insensitive?!?
Twitter isn't suiciding themselves fast enough. That company has become a cesspool of everything that's politcally correct. They need to speed up their death.
Go back to this, then we'll talk.
Some of us were birds before it was cool.
Where nobody uses twitter?
This should stop that company from bleeding investor's money like a sieve
An egg by any other name, will smell just as rotten.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Say, that seems handy...
Can I block everyone using the default icon?
Better chance of transforming into a rainbow flying bigfoot unicorn with mutant superpowers.
Surely this is an April Fools? Nope, posted on March 31st.
Seriously folks, stop and think: Twitter changed an icon and a product manager did terrible design... Let's all just move along.
I haven't heard much out of Twitter since over a dozen of his sockpuppets were outed.