Regardless of what you think about the Quick Bar in the newest version of Twitter for iOS, there’s no contesting that it’s definitely captured tech pundits’ imaginations for the past weekend or so.
This happened primarily because of general ad aversion but was aided by the fact that influential tech blogger John Gruber catchily dubbed it the Dick Bar, in homage to both new Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and the fact that the “alerting function” is a little obtrusive and a little too hard on (that’s what she said) Promoted Trends, which really aren’t trends at all but ads, costing advertisers around 100K a pop.
Riffing off of how some Twitter Trending Topics are inane (um), developer Mark Beeson has created his own Dick Bar, one line of Javascript that will let you display Twitter’s auto-overlaying attempts at a viable form of mobile advertising on your own site. (To its credit Twitter has submitted a less obtrusive version to the app store, as to how much less obtrusive it is actually is remains to be seen — Costolo has been adamant about not including a way to turn it off.)
Says Beeson on the inspiration behind his creation,
“I don’t know that “inspiration” is the right word… that implies there’s been an accomplishment of some sort, of which I’m pretty sure if you asked the Twitter dev crew right now, rolling back their repository to the sounds of Internet Rage ™ and cheap shots like mine probably doesn’t count as an accomplishment.
As to why I wrote the thing, seeing “#tigerblood” in gigantic 64-pixel letters is really a reflection of just how absurd the trending topics really are. I think I understand where Twitter is going with this whole thing, but before carving out the ad space, they really should make trends much more relevant to individual users.”
I’ve embedded Beeson’s effort, above, to further demonstrate the value of such information for readers. But don’t get too uppity because, as Peter Kafka points out, Twitter advertising is here to stay. We ain’t seen nothing yet so don’t waste your energy bitching. I guess the only #Dickbar recourse for now is either #dealwithit or #makefunofit or build something better.