Goodbye to Hashtags and @Replies

Word on the street from Twitter this week is that hashtags and @replies are on they way out. Being described as "arcane" by the sites head of news partnerships, Vivian Schiller. It has been suggested that they are "working on moving the scaffolding of Twitter into the background."To us it seems that Twitter is wanting to do a change to make it more interesting to new users. When asked to clarify what Vivian Schiller had to say, Twitter representatives had this to say:"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. And we took initial steps in that direction with the introduction of media forward timelines and in-line social actions in October, and we're already starting to see early signs that those initiatives are working well."Though when asked directly whether hashtags and @replies will be removed the reply was that they weren't removing them at all. But we are told to "watch this space".In the case of the Android Twitter app. Buzzfeed seems to have gotten their hands on some screenshots that suggests that @replies have been phased out. Who knows what Twitter is up to exactly. I guess we will just have to wait and see. Though if the evidence from screen shots from over the last month are anything to go by, we may be seeing Twitter looking much like Facebook