March 23, 2014: Twitter will soon get rid of hashtags and @ symbols in order to simplify its usage and attract new users as well. According to Twitter’s Vivian Schiller, ’The symbols ‘@’ and ‘#’ are an arcane and will soon be removed from Twitter.’ These reply protocols have now been considered as one of the reasons for not being able to attract new users towards Twitter.
“There’s a lot of creative thinking going on around how to make Twitter more and more intuitive. Watch this space” tweeted Schiller. The potential changes come as Twitter hits something of a speedbump as it marks its birthday.
According to Twitter’s official reports, the growth in its active users base is slowing down, with only one million new users joining in the previous quarter in the US and nine million joining globally for a total of 241 million active monthly users.
Schiller made these announcements after Dick Costolo, CEO, stated, "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.”
