What is a dickbar?

by Dave Winer, dickbar.org
June 14th 2002

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Being from the East Coast, as I am, I recognize the term "dickbar" as an eastcoastism. It refers to a new feature in Twitter for the iPhone which brings the first instream advertising to the eyeballs of Twitter users. It's the kind of thing a guy from Philly, Gruber, who roots for the Yankees might say. As far as I know he coined the term.

This is what a dickbar looks like.

Gruber is referring to the first rumblings of the promised business model from Chicagoan Dick Costolo, the (relatively) new CEO of Twitter. He, I conclude is 1/2 of the "dick" in dickbar.

The other half is how you feel for believing that Twitter would do something classy and interesting with advertising, as we were promised when, the newly minted COO of Twitter, the same Dick Costolo told us we would love their advertising. Yeah uhuh. Us East Coast guys have a bridge we'd like to sell you. It connects Manhattan with the great borough of Brooklyn. Real cheap.

Advertising works for Google because when you go to Google you're looking for something. That's why you went there. So they can show you something like what you asked for and hope in some way it comes closer to what you want. Or, like most advertising, it could be a distraction. We noticed that people who drive BMWs also like Starbucks. We don't know why, but we thought we'd launch our new coffee place by running an ad next to searches for BMWs. It might just work. Or not.

No one yet knows why people use Twitter. I'm a regular. I use it for the same reason I used to smoke two packs of Marlboro Lights every day. It's a hard habit to break. No one has any idea if it's a good place to drop ads. We're going to find out, it seems.

But the rabbis and linguists of Twitter are having a lot of fun with the dickbar concept.

And a bit of sympathy for the people at Twitter, who are cursed to have a service that makes it easy for people to complain about the service itself. I've been there. Supporting bloggers with a commercial product or service is generally not a lot of fun.

PS: When I discovered that dickbar.org wasn't taken, I had to get it.

Original Page: http://dickbar.org/

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