Hot on the heels of Google Instant and a new look Digg, comes a much needed revamp of the mightiest micro-blogging platform of them all, Twitter.
It’s been a long time coming but the new look Twitter is just around the corner. The redesign will be rolled out slowly over the next few weeks (I’m still waiting), but there are plenty of Twitter users who have been able to see and use the new version.
As you would expect, it’s getting mixed reviews.
The people at Techcrunch have been using it for a little while and have written a blog post about some of the changes they have so far noticed.
These include:
- The “What’s Happening?” box is narrower
- The users real name sites next to the Twitter handle (which cannot be switched off)
- There’s a new way to send tweet – the overlay box. This appears when you hit the pad of a paper/pen icon or “n” on the keyboard
- Import flickr sets – these appear in the right hand pane
- Messages area is cleaner
- Lots of keyboard shortcuts (some hidden)
- Hit “.” to refresh the tweet stream (yay!)
- Larger profile icons
To see what the new Twitter has in store, take a look at this video (which, incidentally, is accompanied by a great soundtrack).
And here is another video I found on PBS. This features an interview with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and provides more of an insight into the changes. What’s interesting is the notion that many people use Twitter as a place to watch and discover more about the subjects they’re interested in rather than interact with other users or tell the world what they are doing in 140 characters or less.
There are some reports that the new Twitter will mean the death of third party apps such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite. This might be so if the new Twitter easily allows the management of multiple accounts or enables the user to create scheduled tweets, but if it doesn’t, I can’t really see third party apps losing too much of their current user base.
Personally I am looking forward to the new Twitter. What about you? Has your account been updated? If so, what do you think of it?
They do really need to catch up, with facebook already planning to join the search game and Google joining the social networking. But I think twitter still needs to slowly renovate their platform, since it might change people’s hearts if sudden changes will be implemented immediately.
Most of the responses to the new Twitter (on Twitter) have been quite negative. It’s always the same when there is a major overhaul, just look at what recently happened at Digg. People don’t like change. And major changes carry much more of a risk than smaller changes.
Thanks for the RT!
Changes were made yesterday, it looks slick and fine to me. But I think the changes made twitter slower, not really sure with that, it could be due to my connection. But what I particularly liked is that they have made the list of followers/following longer, much easier to see new followers.
I’m still waiting. I’ve been waiting for so long now all of the excitement has gone!
Thanks Stephen. My friend is on the new layout and love it. Embedding videos, etc will make it much more appealing to new users who find it all kind of “plain” right now. I hope this will save them from that look, and with the keyboard shortcuts it should make it more friendly as well.