You may have noticed that this week, Twitter announced a new two-pane format on Twitter.com – aimed at providing a richer user experience, and billed as “An easier faster an richer experience”.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams has written –
“Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little. The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what’s happening. Yet, we’ve learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less.”
With the new two pane format, Twitter has partnered with a vartey of other services including Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to make tweeted content easy to access direct from Twitter.com itself, giving user less reason to click away from the site.
The first pane is essentially the normal Twitter timeline of tweets that you would be used to. However, in the second pane, (referred to as the “details pane”), users will see additional info related to the author or subject of a tweet, when clicked. This pane will also display things like @replies, other tweets from that user, maps, videos, photos, etc. Users can click the @username to see profiles from the same page.
The New Twitter changes are expected be rolled out to users as a preview over the next few weeks – with an option to to switch back and forth until you get accustomed to the way things work. Eventually, everyone is expected to have the updated version of Twitter.com
The video below is Twitters own video which demonstrates some of the features of NewTwitter :
New Twitter & SEO?
Danny Sullivan has published a post – The New Twitter and Search – an illustrated guide which looks a some of the implications of the #newtwitter design on search – here is an outline of his main points :
- The search box becomes more prominent.
- More filtering options
- “Save this search” becomes more prominent
- Infinite scrolling on search results
- People and company results more clearly separated
- Tweets Near You feature
- Tweets with Links feature
- Searches for retweets by others, retweets by you, and your tweets, retweeted