Twitter kills the QuickBar
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Twitter has removed the QuickBar from its iPhone app, to the delight of a loud and passionate group of grumblers on the Web who bestowed it with another name that we can’t publish here.
At the beginning of the month, Twitter updated its iPhone app so that its QuickBar, a small black strip across the top of a user’s Twitter feed, would drop down and display what’s trending on the microblogging service or show ads.
‘One very cool update is iPhone specific -– for now. We’ve introduced the QuickBar that lets you quickly see trends at the top of your timeline. You can swipe the QuickBar to the left or right to see additional trends,’ Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner wrote when the feature was announced.
Well, the QuickBar totally never caught on. In fact, a lot of people were irritated by it giving the bar pejorative nicknames across the Internet.
On Thursday, Twitter retreated from its QuickBar, removing it from the iPhone app and issuing a ‘mea culpa’ of sorts to its users.
‘The QuickBar was originally conceived to help users discover what’s happening in the broader world beyond people they already follow,’ Twitter Creative Director Doug Bowman wrote in a blog post. ‘The bar was also seen as a potential means of in-app notifications for new @mentions, DMs, and other important activity.’
The QuickBar was experimental, Bowman said.
‘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,’ he said. ‘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.’
But while the QuickBar wasn’t particularly loved, it did get used, Bowman said.
‘We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline,’ he said. ‘Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board.’
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Images: The QuickBar in-action on Twitter’s iPhone app. Credit: Twitter