New York — Farewell QuickBar, we hardly knew ye. After a rather bumpy beginning, microblogging site Twitter on Thursday said it has abolished the “QuickBar” from its iPhone app, which provided users with updates on trending topics, to the delight of a loud and passionate group of grumblers on the Web who disliked the feature.
Early this 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 didplayed a single random trending topic–sometimes sponsored, sometimes organic–that stuck to the top of the Tweet stream.
“One very cool update is iPhone specific — for now. We have unveiled the QuickBar that empowers you to quickly peep into 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, in response to user backlash, Twitter even released an update that made the QuickBar disappear when users scrolled down the stream, but a lot of people were irritated by it giving the bar pejorative nicknames across the Internet. Now, Twitter is backtracking.
“The QuickBar was originally formulated to help users discover what is 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.
“We will continually experiment by trying new things, adding new features, and being bold in the product decisions we make,” the official blog said of the decision.
“After testing a feature and evaluating its merits, if we learn it does not improve the user experience or serve our mission, we will remove that feature,” Bowman 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.”
For an evolution of the Quick Bar, see the slideshow here.