Twitter has announced a radical new design for their own homepage. Yesterday, to much fanfare they announced “Today, we’re introducing a new, re-engineered Twitter.com that provides an easier, faster, and richer experience”. You can find out more about the enhancements on Twitter information page here. But here are some of the highlights:
- Enchanced new design. The new Twitter.com has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets. The site also now offers infinite scroll — you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.
- Embedded Media. You will now be able to embed photos and videos directly intoon Twitter, due to 16 partnerships with DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.
- Related content. Click on a tweet and the details pane shows you additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.
- Mini profiles. Click a username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets
Mashable succinctly describes the forthcoming update as “…a desktop app minus the download” and I think that makes a very fair description of the new site. You can see an example of the new interface below. For iPad users, the revamped Twitter interface will be familiar. Twitter for iPad uses a very similar display to the new Twitter site.
Lifehacker has collated a list of all of the keyboard shortcuts which will helpful to users, once they are migrated to the new site. You can learn more about the shortcuts below:
Navigation
- j/k to move between the next and previous tweets
- Enter to drill down into or close a selected tweet
- space to page down
- Shift+space to page up
- / to jump to the search box
- . to refresh and jump back to the top
Actions for Individual Tweets
- f to favorite a tweet
- r to reply to a tweet
- t to retweet
- m to send a direct message
- n to compose a new tweet
- Escape to cancel a compose window, dismiss the help window
The roll out for Twitter users will begin within the next few weeks, so watch out for your upgrade. Personally, I think this is a great revamp. The Twitter experience will become richer for users, and the embeddable media features will save time. Today, I don’t like having to go to sites such as Twitpic and Yfrog to view picture content. However, I do wonder how desktop clients such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck will respond to this update? Are we going to Twitter desktop clients evolving. Or, does the new Twitter upgrade make desktop clients redundant? Only time will tell.
Great job Twitter team!
