According to latest reports microblogging giant Twitter in seemingly trying to get rid of hashtags and the @replies.
BuzzFeed has based its report on comments by Vivian Schiller, Twitter’s head of news while addressing the Newspaper Association of America’s media Xchange conference in Denver. Schiller called at-replies and hashtags “arcane” and hinted that the site was “working on moving the scaffolding of Twitter into the background.”
Twitter representatives, clarifying Schiller’s comments, said Schiller was just reiterating an earlier comment made by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a recent earning’s calls about the company’s future plans.
Costolo had earlier said “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.”
Meanwhile Schiller later on said that Twitter is not planning to get rid of hashtags and @replies.
“There’s a lot of creative thinking going on around how to make Twitter more and more intuitive. Watch this space,” Schiller said.
However, BuzzFeed claims that Twitter has already started phasing out @replies as it has received a screenshot of Android alpha test group app wherein the app has eliminated the user handle in the reply to a tweet and instead has connected the reply and the main tweet with a conversation line.
