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Twitter rolling out Archive feature, allows you to download your tweet history
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Corporate News, Internet,
If you thought you could just bury the past under an onslaught of new tweets, then you're about as wrong as Commissioner Gordon and Batman at the end of The Dark Knight.
The truth always comes out eventually, and this time it's coming out one tweet at a time in the form of your very personalized Twitter archive that, you guessed it, contains every tweet you ever posted. Each personalized archive is done up in HTML and divided by month, so you can remember the great (and not so great) times of your social media life a month at a time.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo promised this feature earlier, but it appears to be rolling out for select users right now, and you may very well be one of them. To check, go to your Twitter account and see if you find "Your Twitter Archive" under the settings page.
Read More | The Next Web
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Why the Twitter Quick Bar (DickBar) is a bad move
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Software,
Twitter users are up in arms over the Twitter Quick Bar, which pundit John Gruber termed the "Dickbar" after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a forced trending topics bar appearing at the top of the new iPhone Twitter client. To some extent, this is just whining—there are so many Twitter clients out there, it's easy to find one with the layout you prefer. But it also shows the bigger problem with Twitter's trending topics, which the service has managed very poorly since it became a mass medium.
Real estate is precious on small phone screens, and users demand that every pixel be spent on something relevant. People are willing to make an exception for ads on free apps; after all, developers need to pay the bills. But the trending topics tend to spotlight micro-communities that don't overlap much with each other. As an optional means of discovery, they're mildly interesting. Forced upon us, they bombard us with irrelevant data that breaks down our carefully constructed social-networking comfort zones.
Twitter started out, years ago, as a social service for a common techno-clique who all attended the South by Southwest music conference, so trending topics made sense. But since then, it's expanded and fragmented into a mass medium made up of non-overlapping micro-communities. Everybody uses Twitter differently, but almost everybody consciously or unconsciously cultivates their feed. The trending topics are like a loud stranger wandering into your invitation-only party.
The Quick Bar is really about advertising, of course. Twitter is trying to make money off "promoted topics" for movies and consumer products. But I don't think that's the source of the real anger here. Most people see ads as a necessary evil so we can get free stuff. But we don't understand why our screens are full of jibber-jabber about Brazilian TV presenters.
Click to continue reading Why the Twitter Quick Bar (DickBar) is a bad move
Twitter CEO: There will be no Twitter phone
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Smartphones, Corporate News,
The media seems fixated on branded phones. Google phones, Facebook phones, Twitter phones. For the companies, it make a lot of sense. A place like Facebook, where many people already spend a large amount of their web time browsing that site, would love to have your whole mobile experience encompassed in their own service. Just last week, INQ announced that they will make such a phone for Facebook. It's another story for users however, which may be weary of using a phone that is dependant on a single service. This Monday at the Mobile World Congress, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo answered a question by saying that Twitter had no plan to ever do a Twitter phone, and that the very concept was not what the company was about. He said "Twitter already works on every device you’re going to hear about this week. Tweets flow seamlessly across platforms; that’s what we’re trying to accomplish." He compared Twitter with water, which is everywhere, forgotten, but available in many ways.
Read More | Mashable
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