I Liked It When Quick Bars Got Me Drunk

Twitter pushed an update for Twitter for iPhone yesterday that mostly centered around the new “Quick Bar”. The Quick Bar is a new technological innovation that brings the power of a business plan to Twitter, Inc.

With this new update, I can finally forfeit that additional one-tenth of my screen real estate I’ve been meaning to shed. A beautiful five-tweet vertically-stacked display can miraculously, at just the click of an AppStore update button, turn into four tweets. Or three! I can also gain an ever-present UI element constantly informing me about mysterious subjects like “Friday” or “blackpeoplemovies” or “Donald Trump”. Sometimes, if I’m really lucky, it will inform me about a really neat product from a company that is so neat that the company needs to pay Twitter money to help promote it.

How does Twitter gain such technological insights into this market? Is it the one developer they hire to work on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps? Is it because that one developer only tweets every twenty days? Is it because, even though that one developer is strapped for time, he usually makes good UI decisions and this is very clearly a top-down example where Twitter executives wanted to insert their Monetary Acquisition Strategy into their popular product regardless of how horrendously misguided the implementation was? I’ll let you decide! They’re all just so exciting!