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.
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
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.
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.
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 journalists, especially if people who are known to be controversial and good for ratings use it a lot. They love to repeat what others have said on Twitter even though those who care about the twit are probably already following them, so we get an endless barrage of, "you won't believe what X said on Twitter!" when it's not even a matter of not believing, it's a matter of not caring.
Unfortunately for Twitter, there doesn't really seem to be a good way to monetize it. They're stuck paying for what I have to assume is expensive infrastructure to maintain but with their character limit and intentional ability to send notifications to non-web devices and protocols that aren't twitter's own clients they can't get ad revenue, and apparently their backend is so badly written that they can't even do a good job of data-mining to sell trend data.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Sad!
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...instead of actually dealing with the trolls and bots, we're going to stop identifying them clearly.
-Styopa
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
Go back to this, then we'll talk.
Some of us were birds before it was cool.
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.
I haven't heard much out of Twitter since over a dozen of his sockpuppets were outed.