At an exclusive event yesterday, Twitter revealed a complete redesign for Twitter.com. The new design takes things in a different direction and gives many third-party clients a run for their money. We also heard a few stats that bear repeating.
In the beginning, it was important to emphasize the content creation aspect of Twitter. Now, with the ridiculous number of users that have joined the service and the thriving ecosystem that has grown up around Twitter, content creation is no longer the focus. Meaning users no longer need to tweet to gain value from Twitter. They are seeing 90 million tweets per day, 25% of those tweets contain links and 90% of that content is public.
To leverage this treasure trove of content, the interface has been redesigned to focus on content consumption. Each tweet may be only 140 characters, but the included links add another level of depth. Location and context also add deeper meaning to a simple tweet.
The most important new feature here is the ability to click on an individual tweet and dig into the information it holds. A separate pane opens up showing just about any detail imaginable. Partnerships with DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube allow Twitter to show media inline right on the site. Of course, there is still data about the tweet that Twitter already holds and that will be shown as well. Clicking a tweet will also bring up things like the conversation that led up to the tweet, who has retweeted it, people mentioned in the tweet, and location of the tweet on a map.
While Twitter.com still remains the most popular destination for people to interact with Twitter, there is no reason they couldn’t push that percentage higher. This new site redesign looks like a step in that direction. If Twitter.com keeps innovating, there will really be no need for most third-party clients.
They have added embedded media, infinite scrolling, and other details. The new design is fast and responsive. They have even added keyboard shortcuts to make navigating your timeline a snap. If that’s not a trick to get us geek interested, I don’t know what is.
The new design will be rolling out over the next few weeks. The screen shots are compelling, but it remains to be seen if this will be enough for people to ditch their web and desktop Twitter clients. I also wonder if they will be adding any additional functionality to their mobile site.
via Twitter, FastCompany