I think its a significant statement that changes to Twitter's look is being announced on the today programme, as opposed to Techchrunch or similar. Twitter is now well and truly used by the general population, and looking at its strategy from a tech or Silicon Valley coloured glasses wont work.
Look at it either way: its jumped the shark, or jumped (crossed) the chasm. But jumped it surely has.
I'm curious as to what Twitter's direction with these changes are
The old style, which I prefer and find very functional, focuses on the content (the individual tweets)
The new style, focuses on the profile of the author itself, and not their content. Very Facebook-esque direction to focus of the persona instead of the Tweet.
It's simple, really. Most of the time, when I click through to a user, I'm looking to see who they are. This is likely due to a retweet in my timeline and I'm looking to see how I might be associated with this person. Far less frequently do I click through to see their other tweets.
Lets be honest, this is what people want. People beg and plead to get others to follow them, it's not about saying anything, it's about making the person look or feel important/liked/relevant.
The new iPad app is atrocious. I thought I somehow accidentally got the phone version somehow because it appeared so jumbled. It's better in portrait, but I normally use landscape and there is an incredible amount of unused space. I still haven't figured out how to switch to my other Twitter accounts, I just see one. The web view is now full screen so I can't read tweets and have a link open at the same time (handy with breaking news to read the story and then reactions).
It's like they didn't consider landscape at all. Rotating simply adds margins to the side of the main UITableView. Baffling. But after they made a power play to ensure they don't have competition in the Twitter app space, it's infuriating.
In a very short time they have taken out 3rd party apps and made their own worse (for no apparent gain on their end, the new app doesn't appear to have more ads or anything).
Wow, that was unintuitive, but thanks for the tip. There's three inches of empty space available and I have to figure out to hold an icon to switch accounts. Not to mention I can no longer see the status of those other accounts (I await the push notification that I can't find because it's in another account somewhere).
It looks good and should work well for businesses. Clearly Facebook inspired, but that's not a bad thing. Also, Twitter was the only major network without cover images (although they had background images).
I think these changes make it pretty clear why Twitter needs to control 100% of the way their content is displayed and why they're killing off any apps that won't do that.
I can't help but think this is also a blatant attempt to copy some essence of Facebook's recent Timeline design.
I think this is a big waste of space if you're already following someone, what they're talking about should be the primary focus. I wonder if they'll start with the view scrolled down a bit how cover photos on Facebook do.
The iPhone App is the best example of this waste of space.
That banner image takes up about 1/3 of the screen, leaving 2/3 for UI elements, actual information like follower/following and tweet count and one single tweet.
It's not only a waste of space if you are already following someone but also if you want to discover new people to start following.
What users are talking about should be the primary focus in every case - whether you are already following the user or not.
The normal response to this would be "You get an app if you're more interested in the content", but then I realized that Twitter is going out of their way to kill off apps.
Seems like a gradual winding down to me. First a bunch of onerous and (frankly utterly fucktarded) UI restrictions which completely limit the utility of any multi-social-network clients (this was the one that really grinds my gears), then the hard cap on the number of users that any one API user can have.. what's next?
I think the new design: https://twitter.com/twitter is pretty ugly and puts the author's bio and URL in an odd place. The banner image will interfere with that text and make it difficult to read.
I'm curious why they didn't roll out this layout to everyone: https://twitter.com/yankees It's much cleaner.
I could previously see 6/7 of the account's previous tweets (on a more-standard resolution than most devs are used to),, now I see 3. All for a blue-ish box.
The increased emphasis on photo sharing is interesting. Facebook bought Instagram a few months back. Just the other day Google announced the acquisition of Snapseed. Now Twitter is making changes to make photo sharing more relevant to the experience.
It seems like photo sharing is strategically important to each of these companies. Anyone have any insights as to why?
I suspect being able to send a message to a friend without having to remember/maintain phone numbers or e-mail addresses is also a key feature for social networks. It provides a reliable way of finding someone, and it means people can maintain their own real-life contact details in one place and have everyone else's records update automatically and accurately.
But yes, sharing photos is surely one of the most important applications for such a platform. People like to keep in touch, and in the age of cameraphones and high speed Internet connections, a picture often is worth 1,000 words.
Look at it either way: its jumped the shark, or jumped (crossed) the chasm. But jumped it surely has.