The ever present hashtag and @replies on Twitter that make a post their look like comic book cursing may soon be a thing of the past.
That new came courtesy of Vivian Schiller, Twitter's head of news, who called the tags arcane and put out the thought that they may not be around much longer. She let her thoughts be known over the weekend at the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference in Denver.
In fact Schiller may have spoken a bit out of turn. When Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was asked he gave a much more cryptic answer.
"By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background, we can increase high-quality interactions and make it more likely that new or casual users will find this service as indispensable as our existing core users do. And we took initial steps in that direction with the introduction of media forward timelines and in-line social actions in October, and we're already starting to see early signs that those initiatives are working well," Schiller said.
Schiller did clarify her comments somewhat by Tweeting, "There's a lot of creative thinking going on around how to make Twitter more and more intuitive. Watch this space."
Buzzfeed, which first broke the news, indicated that Twitter is already starting to move ahead with the change. That site said it has seen beta version of how the site would work without at replies and hashtags.
Since change of any type always ruffles the feathers of social network addicts, just ask Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, any change Twitter makes is likely to cause an uprising. However, eliminating some of the shorthand that takes place on Twitter could do wonders for making it easier to use and less confusing to the uninitiated.
The hashtag and other symbols that have been incorporated into the Twitterverse have probably initiated more Google searches by users than any other aspect of the service. Steps like this may be necessary if the company wishes to move the platform forward.
Costolo admitted back in January that the site has a problem helping new users to start enjoying the service.
"That language and scaffolding can be confusing and opaque," Costolo said. To solve the problem of so-called Twitter quitters who login once and never come back, he said, it needs to be "clear and simple."
This lack of clarity can be seen in a chart by the research firm Enders Analysis. Here the user friendliness of Facebook can be seen in comparison to Twitter, which indicates steady, but unspectacular growth compared to Facebook's hockey stick appearance.
