Meet the new Twitter--no, not the new Twitter that launched in September 2010 and then tweaked further in August, but the new new Twitter ("newer new Twitter"?) that the San Francisco microblogging service introduced Thursday.
The idea this time seems to be making the hashtag and the @ reply safe for the world. Twitter's compressed argot has begun spilling beyond the confines of its site--"hashtaggery" can crop up in office banter and even the end zone of a football field--but it can be intimidating to the unitiated.
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So the new interface features prominent "@ Connect" and "# Discover" headings, both on the web and in Twitter's updated iPhone and Android apps, to steer users to responses to their own tweets and the broader conversation among its 100 million-plus users. (Installing either of those mobile programs should get you earlier access to the updated web version, which Twitter plans to move everyone over to in the coming weeks.)
The Discover view can be a real time-suck, with its river-of-news flow of changing headlines and photos. At least it's not constantly visible, unlike the ticker Facebook added in its latest redesign.
The primary timeline view eases inspecting earlier tweets in a thread or such linked tidbits as photos, geotags or Foursquare check-ins: They all open up inline, below the tweet instead of to its right, a small change that feels less distracting. And opening a tweet in its own page reveals a new "Embed this tweet" option that lets you include a live copy of it on another site.
The biggest benefit is unifying Twitter's web and app interfaces: With the same basic layout and capabilities on your larger and smaller screens, you have fewer mental gears to shift when you turn from one to the other. Well, except for direct messages, which continue to go unheralded on the web even as its apps prominently notify you of their arrival.
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But with all of these changes--others include keyboard shortcuts for web users and souped-up profiles for advertisers--Twitter has temporarily sacrificed some usability. Longtime users must reprogram old habits to accommodate the relocation of the timeline from the left of Twitter's page to the right and the movement of its search box in the opposite direction.
(Disclosures: I use Twitter to market myself and so does Discovery News.)
You have to wonder how soon the next redesign will arrive. I can't think of many other areas where it's customary to rewrite a interface every year: Imagine if Microsoft redid the look of Word every 14 months or a magazine adopted a new layout with the same frequency. It's possible to applaud this creativity and hope that those responsible pick a channel and stay with it.
Plus, that would allow Twitter to turn its attention to its original sin: It doesn't let its users retrieve all the data they've contributed. I've cranked out the equivalent of two novels there, but I can't see more than the last eight months' worth, much less download it all for my own use. The history books and memoirs of the future are waiting to be written when Twitter honors this fundamental rule: If you put data into a service, you should be able to take it out.
Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery
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