Twitter kills wildly unpopular QuickBar
The iPhone app feature was the bane of many influential Twitter users, who said it was annoying and irrelevant.
The only real surprise is that it took this long: Twitter has released an update to its iPhone app that eradicates the QuickBar, a pop-up display of rotating "trending topics" that users seemed to find almost universally annoying and nonhelpful.
Twitter claimed that people did, in fact, interact with the heavily maligned feature, which was initially released earlier this month. "Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today," a post on the Twitter blog explained. "We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what's happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this."
With insidery tech circles dubbing the feature "dickbar" in reference to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and the oft-derogatory alternate meaning of his first name, it was clear that even if ordinary users didn't care, some influential people thought it was a terrible user experience.
"We will frequently experiment by trying new things, adding new features, and being bold in the product decisions we make," the blog post added. "After testing a feature and evaluating its merits, if we learn it doesn't improve the user experience or serve our mission, we'll remove that feature."
The direction of Twitter's product development is likely to make a few twists and turns these days, given the company's recent changes in management. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey recently returned to the company as executive chairman, while fellow co-founder Evan Williams has stepped away from full-time participation there. Costolo, hired as chief operating officer, replaced Williams as CEO last fall.