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.<p>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<p>The old style, which I prefer and find very functional, focuses on the content (the individual tweets)<p>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.
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).<p>tl;dr seems like a huge step back
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.<p>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.
I think the new design: <a href="https://twitter.com/twitter" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/twitter</a> 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.<p>I'm curious why they didn't roll out this layout to everyone: <a href="https://twitter.com/yankees" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/yankees</a> It's much cleaner.
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.<p>It seems like photo sharing is strategically important to each of these companies. Anyone have any insights as to why?