Last week, the Nigerian tech ecosystem welcomed Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and some of Twitter executives in some prime locations in Nigeria. Jack and the other Twitter executives, Kayvon Beykpour, Product Lead and co-founder of Periscope; Parag Agrawal, Chief Technology Officer (CTO); and Mike Montano, Engineering Team Lead, answered questions about Twitter plans for Africa and Nigeria and how they hope to increase the number of users in the country. Subsequently, the creator of the viral Twitter-based bot, Dara Oladosu, was introduced to the Twitter executives and shared with them the story of how he built the bot as well as the stats it had gained since its creation. After his narration, Kayvon Beykpour offered him a job on the spot to help build a native “quoted tweet” feature for twitter.
Background of Quoted Replies
Since its inception, Twitter has continued to evolve in different ways by adding new features like retweet with a comment and increasing the character count for each tweet. While it has become easier to quote tweet with or without a comment, finding quoted replies to other people’s tweet still remained a hassle of some sorts and it was a knowledge hidden to most users. Then, Quoted Replies came to save the day.
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Quoted Replies is a Twitter bot that helps find quoted replies of a particular tweet without going through the hassle of copying and pasting URL and then searching for it. With @QuotedReplies, Twitter users can now find tweet replies to a quoted tweet.
The Creator
Dara Oladosu is the Nigerian software developer that built the Quoted Replies bot in December 2018 as a solution to the long process of copying a tweet’s link to search Twitter for its quoted replies. Then, he built a chrome extension that can perform the same function but on the web version of Twitter.
Two Lagos-based mobile app developers, Hamza Fetuga and Abdulhafeez Sagaya, used the Chrome extension and reached out to Dara to build the Android and iOS versions of the bot. over the months, the bot encountered a lot of issues with Twitter banning it and a breakthrough came in July 2019 when Dara was able to discover the issue and successfully solved it. Since then, the bot has gained popularity serving users all over the world from Africa, North America, South America, and Europe.
With over 27,000 followers and 40 million impressions in October alone, Quoted Replies is a solution to the popular social media platform.
How it works
To view all the quoted replies for a particular tweet, reply @QuotedReplies handle under the tweet and the bot would immediately send the link of the Twitter search result of all the quoted replies for that tweet.
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On the Chrome extension, it is also as easy. By simply clicking on the tweet, the “Replies” popup icon would show up and a click on it would reveal all the quoted replies on that tweet.
What’s Next?
Going forward, the popular Quoted Replies may become defunct after Twitter builds its own native feature for that purpose but Dara is excited to work with Twitter on this project as it would provide a platform for him to help users better with less limitations.
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Featured Image Source: Dara Oladosu – Youtube
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