San Francisco — Twitter Inc. on Thursday stunned it competitors with a mind-boggling announcement since Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s creator, returned to the company as an executive in March. The popular micro-blogging outfit rolled out a major redesign that depicts a new simplified design as well as the addition of four new tabs to help users stay in touch with their interests more easily, and some of its biggest features includes new apps for iOS and Android, in a bold attempt to make itself more relevant–not to mention more attractive to advertisers.
Twitter’s blog details the changes users can expect and the layout of the Twitter timeline and users’ profiles. It also adds a new discovery tool, overhauls the @Mentions section, and provides an easy-access “tweet” button.
“At the very crux there are fewer places you have to click and less you have to learn,” Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said as he and other executives unveiled the changes at the thriving startup’s new San Francisco offices.
Executive Jack Dorsey, in New York this year, oversees Twitter’s look.
“We have done a lot of user testing and it has proven to be much simpler,” Dorsey added.
The main concept behind the redesign is to basically change how users will access their most important tweets and the most important information they convey. For example, Twitter has decided to connect its service to the notion of “home,” and to try to rebrand the hashtag–one of its users’ most ingenious inventions–as the “discover” tool.
At the same time, Twitter is launching its first branding pages in an attempt to steal some of Facebook’s thunder with advertisers. The four new tabs that you can start planning to get acquainted with are Home, Connect, Discover, Me, and Tweet, which will look like this:
The company stated that when people first sign up to use the service, Twitter will assist them find information that might interest them, based on their location and other signals.
“It is not just a visual redesign but a conceptual redesign to make Twitter more accessible to the next billion users,” said Satya Patel, a Twitter senior executive, at an event inside the San Francisco-based company’s future headquarters in an Art Deco building in a blighted neighborhood here.
With the moves today, Twitter is making it clear that it wants users’ experiences to be the same, regardless of where they access “Home.” You will now discover that the stream of Tweets has been switched to the right side of your screen with the left side now the location of trending topics, suggestions on people to follow and your own profile details (your bio, tweets, and followers).
Another big modification in the re-design seems to be the Discover tab, which appears to consolidate the Who To Follow, Find Friends and Browse Interests actions into one page. Additionally, the Discover tab will also link users to stories via tweets where you can preview stories from news sources, watch videos within the tweet, and follow tweets related to the story.
Moreover, overhauled navigation features take advantage of the fact that Twitter symbols such as @ and # are making their way into common culture, showing up anywhere from text messages to advertising billboards and television.
In fact, Twitter designed Connect navigation tools that basically turn those symbols into new age URLs, or web addresses, to let people find all posts or other information being fired off about topics.
“The @ symbol has become the new URL; the fastest way to connect with anyone in the world,” Dorsey said.
The latest update is now accessible on mobile.twitter.com, as well as the iPhone and Android apps, and will be rolling out gradually to Twitter.com over the next few weeks. It will also apply to TweetDeck, which Twitter acquired in May.
“What we are announcing today is just the beginning,” Twitter said in a blog post. “We now have a framework in place that we will quickly build and iterate upon to help users connect with whatever is meaningful to them.”
Finally, as the name implies, the “Me” section is all about you. The functionality of your Twitter profile has not changed much, but the layout is flipped and streamlined slightly.
For those quick bursts of inspiration, meanwhile, Twitter added a “Speak Up” button on the top right that provides quick access to the tweet box.
More details about the changes are available via fly.twitter.com. Here is a Twitter video outlining the redesign:
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