Twitter may remove @-replies, hashtags

Anupam Saxena, TOI Tech | Mar 20, 2014, 05.18PM IST

The Union government has stepped up its efforts to stop what it perceives an online campaign of misinformation and rumour-mongering in the wake of Assam riots and has blocked several Twitter accounts, including two belonging to journalists.

NEW DELHI: Can't imagine Twitter without @ (at) replies and (#) hashtags? Consider them as integral components of the popular microblogging website? Yes, they are for now, but may be not in the future. Twitter may be planning to do away with them. At least this is what Vivian Schiller, head of news at Twitter, recently hinted at.

Speaking at the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference, Schiller termed at-replies and hashtags as "arcane" and suggested that these components might be moved into the background.

"We are working on moving the scaffolding of twitter into the background," she added. The development was first reported by BuzzFeed