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Twitter Deciding Whether Killing '@' Symbol Will Bring Back 1 Billion Users
- Bpal 13y agoHashtags and @s are the features that make twitter such a valuable marketing tool. How do they plan to group the news and twitter trends?
- unreal37 13y agoIf Twitter kills @, #, rt, mt ... that will be huge.
- ForHackernews 13y agoGood. Lumping together data and metadata has always been a bad idea. I still say Twitter is a fad. Nothing it offers is a unique value proposition. If the right clique of celebrities moved on to some new, more fashionable network, that would be the end of Twitter.
- KingMob 13y agoTwitter itself may be a fad, but there's still a need for some kind of light-weight, small, broadcast mechanism. If this had been done decades ago, we'd have an RFC and it would be a distributed protocol like email. Instead we have a single company dictating terms, for better or worse.
- ForHackernews 13y agoMaybe it's not too late? We need more protocols and fewer "platforms". Is anyone working on writing such a protocol? The problem is getting somebody to implement and support it. XMPP has suffered because companies refuse to federate, and keep trying to build in their own proprietary extensions.
- lauradhamilton 13y agoI think they're going about this the wrong way. The primary problem they should be trying to solve is that it's fairly tough for a new user to join the ecosystem, get his friends to follow him, etc. It's difficult for a new content-creator to get started. Much harder than with Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google+.