New Twitter Layout: Almost Perfect

This is my official review of the new twitter, and some of the features I like and dislike about it.

The new update to twitter, is fantastic. Let’s start with the bigger changes.

Twitter has had trends since before I started using it about a year ago, and they serve as a unique way to interact and meet strangers and people from different places with something in common, but now there are things called “Stories,” which are basically news headlines that are scraped from popular tweets. If you click your way to the Discover tab, you’ll see them on the right column.

The Discover tab itself is very cool, because it provides a new facet of socializing and discussion, which could make-or-break the update for some people.

The Connect Tab is my favorite so far, because it’s simple. If you click your way into the tab, you’ll see one column, and two options on the left. If you click Interactions, you get the activity feed, which tells you about what your friends have been doing in addition to your mentions. If you click Mentions, it does exactly what you think it will.

The Home tab hasn’t necessarily been redesigned, but a few subtle changes have been made:

• The timeline width has been decreased, giving the illusion of shorter tweets, and appeals more to people who don’t want to get wrapped up in things and waste time.
• Individual tweet height has been decreased as well, and now the text takes up more space, but the tweets still look smaller than before.
• There are two ways from the front page to compose a new tweet, which won’t necessarily double the number of tweets published, but I think that people won’t be as lazy, and will be more open to what they tweet about. Or maybe not.
• The drop-down menu has a feature where you can see keyboard shortcuts for twitter. I knew of a few shortcuts before this, but I didn’t know about all of them. Keyboard navigation tends to be faster when done correctly, Twitter has done it correctly for sure.

These might not seem like notable changes, but I think that the long-term subliminal effect of faster socializing will be noticeable to developers in the weeks to come.

Personally, I think that T2 is fantastic. It’s tough to satisfy me, especially with something on a screen, but my only complaint about Twitter is the silly graphics they have for the tabs.  The engineers have really outdone themselves, and Twitter revenue will undoubtedly reflect the effort they put into their work.

Woohoo Twitter!