The first thing that struck me about the new Twitter is that it goes on forever.
Hopping onto the 140-character communications site and reading the latest tweets was always a risky endeavour, with so many potential distractions and jumping-off points. Now, before you even reach the bottom of the screen, the next batch of tweets is loaded, and you can just keep on reading – and reading and reading…
If Twitter’s aim is to keep people on its site for longer, that’s certainly a good start.
Overall, the new Twitter makes a much more efficient use of screen space, by widening its two columns.
Rather than relying heavily on a single narrow column in the centre of the screen, Twitter makes more use of the space to the right of the Twitter stream. It is here that videos, photos and other additional information about tweets appear, when you click a small > arrow in the top right corner of each individual tweet.
Clicking on the > opens not just a picture or video, but also replies to that tweet, showing you the full conversation about an item. This makes it similar to the stream of comments underneath a Facebook photo or video. At a time when discussion often occurs on social networks where items are distributed, rather than on the site where it’s posted, that’s a very handy feature.
A quarter of tweets contain links, according to the company, but only those services with whom Twitter has signed agreements – including Twitpic, Flickr, DailyBooth, YouTube, Vimeo and Brightcove – can be previewed in the right-hand pane. Maps, for instance from Foursquare updates, and products from selected ecommerce sites, including Etsy will also be shown on the right. Marketers are already salivating and the potential.
If there isn’t any extra conversation or content, clicking the > just shows the user’s most recent tweets.
In another nod to Facebook, real names are now shown alongside Twitter usernames. But Twitter has ditched the fiddly pop-up overlay showing more of a user’s details that appeared when your cursor hovers over their username. Instead, clicking on it brings up a mini-profile, alongside the ability to send a direct message, add to lists and so forth.
Without any overlays of additional content, the right-hand pane puts the current trending topics immediately below a list of your own stats, putting them “above the fold”, where previously my long list of, um, lists had pushed the trends far down the page.
Lists themselves are now one of five tabs atop the main column, alongside timeline, @mentions, retweets (with its own drop-down of RTs by others, yourself and your tweets retweeted) and saved searches (also via a drop-down).
Perhaps the most radical change is to the box for posting tweets. Co-founder Evan Williams said last night that people don’t need to tweet to make the most of Twitter, and as such, the new Twitter design makes the “what’s happening?” box a fraction of the size on the original, just one line deep until you click in the box. There’s nothing more intimidating than a blank page and a flashing cursor, so this could go a long way to helping people who don’t like oversharing to use Twitter as a media consumption platform.
That said, the new design adds a button for posting at the very top right of the screen, making it instantly accessible from anywhere on the site. Alongside it is a tweaked, slimmer Twitter logo (meaning more of the useful content is visible without scrolling down) and shortcuts to your profile, messages and a search box.
The full profile page has been redesigned, with a much larger avatar picture, bio and website link all at the top of the left-hand column. Pages for individual tweets have also been super-sized, and display any attached media.
Power-users will appreciate the addition of keyboard shortcuts for replying, retweeting, DMs and refreshing. The only thing missing here is a way to post without having to reach for the mouse (TweetDeck, for instance, lets you post by pressing enter).
I’m sure there are more new features that I haven’t discovered yet. All in all, there is much to like about the new setup.
Those on a slower internet connection or smaller screen may miss the simplicity of “old Twitter”. Plenty of people use the site because they want something more stripped-down than Facebook or MySpace. My 10-inch netbook screen wasn’t big enough to show the full width of a YouTube video in the right-hand sidebar, for instance. Even on a bigger screen, I’d imagine most people’s custom backgrounds and wallpapers will be almost completely obscured by the new features.
Many people are yet to see the upgrade. Whether this attracts more people to the site more often remains to be seen – it seems likely to keep existing enthusiasts on the site for longer, but that’s not Twitter’s only priority. It has to tread a fine line between making it simple for newbies and giving heavy users a bigger reason to return to the homepage, rather than one of the many third-party clients.
Iain Dodsworth, chief executive of Tweetdeck, one of the most popular desktop apps, had this to say on the new site: “It’s certainly an overdue update to twitter.com and an interesting move to media consumption. From our point of view, it’s clear the majority of our users use TweetDeck for more reasons than just twitter.com was lacking certain features. Accessing multiple streams of data in one place and the services we layer on top are the main reasons and there’s a lot more to come. It’s about social media as a whole.”
Twitter has a lot of catching up to do if it’s going to catch Facebook, both in scale and the number of people spending long periods on its site. Although a recent company blogpost touted 148m registered users, developers in the ecosystem say that active users are likely nearer to 50m – a tenth of Facebook’s figure.
This upgrade brings in several Facebook-like features, but succeeds in making Twitter even more addictive, open and explorable – for me, its greatest points of differentiation.
