04/04/17 - Twitter drops 'egg' avatar in attempt to break association with internet trolls (59)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/03/twitter-drops-egg-avatar-in-attempt-to-break-association-with-internet-trolls

This article is about how Twitter is abandoning its default “egg” avatar in a bid to shake its association with trolls. For the past seven years, new Twitter accounts have been assigned a profile picture of an egg – a playful reference to the site’s bird logo. However, recently the social network announced that it would be introducing default profile photos in a bid to “prompt more self-expression”, and to break free of the association with abuse and trolling on the platform. In addition, some people had retained the default egg profile photo “because they thought it was fun and cute”, read a blog post circulated by Twitter’s product design and research team. So, this specific, new feature would give Twitter a more professional and formal look for a very successful social media site. A spokesperson mentioned that 'the would like to rethink that and change the default profile photo'. They also said "I see you put your engineering manpower into the REALLY serious projects".

• The default profile picture when Twitter first launched in 2006 was of a silhouette of a person. The following year it changed to “o_O”, before the bird motif was introduced in 2009.
• The new default profile photo was chosen through study of bathroom signage iconography, with gender-neutrality a priority, according to Twitter. In a bid to make it feel “temporary, generic and universal”, it was coloured grey.
• “An abusive tweet is an abusive tweet, whether it’s next to an egg, a silhouette or a real person’s avatar.

In addition, I believe that changing the default profile picture from an egg to a more professional look and something which identifies the user is a good thing to a big industry like Twitter; an industry that is as professional as Twitter, they shouldn't use objects such as eggs which would make the social media account as if it was designed for a younger audience. On the other hand, to a lot of the people who use the social media site wouldn't really bother about it because it is just a photo and loads of users normally change their profile pictures anyways and therefore, don't really notice the fact that there are these social media sites.