New York — Popular micro-blogging website Twitter Inc., the service that sends 140-character messages, on Tuesday unveiled a major redesign of its home page, making it easier to post photos, videos and maps directly on the page, for the first time in its four year history to lure more users and entice them to stay longer as it competes for advertising dollars with Internet rivals Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.
Although site makeovers are often fail to make a positive impact, the new Twitter.com is tantamount to a fundamental relaunch of the popular micro-blogging service’s Web-based interface, mostly because it introduces a new interface build around a second viewing pane in which users will be able to see all kinds of content–from photos and videos to user profiles to geolocation information and more.
“A new bird, a new experience, a new twitter.com starts rolling out today,” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said as he showed off the new design at a press event at the firm’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
Twitter co-founders Evan Williams (left) and Biz Stone, speak just before Williams announced the new Twitter.com (Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)
“It is an easier and richer experience, and a better way to unearth what is new in your world.”
Williams said that the latest version of the site is available to some users immediately, while others will see it implemented in the coming weeks.
“This enables you drill down and get more information without ever losing your timeline,” Williams said.
“No more clicking away from the page. You get instant loading of pictures, playable videos — you can see more of conversations in context.”
The redevelopment, which was code named “Phoenix” in keeping with Twitter engineers naming internal projects after birds, will be initially introduced in the United States and gradually extended to all of the service’s 160 million users worldwide, is intended to make the 4-year-old micro-blogging site smoother and faster to use and to serve up more relevant content to users, according to product manager Kevin Cheng.
“We are going to take it easy to insure the stability,” Cheng said of the global roll-out of the new Twitter page. “We are not going to give it a time frame; just watch how it goes.”
About 370,000 people are signing up daily for Twitter, and users fire off more than 90 million tweets each day, according to Williams.
“As you can see, it is going off the charts,” Williams said. “We have been concentrating a lot on infrastructure, performance and reliability. The growth curve is obviously not easy to handle.”
The company announced deals with 16 partners that makes it easier for users to embed their multimedia content within the site, including from YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and TwitPic to display content from those websites.
By giving marketers a new way to use multimedia in online promotions, the redesign also plays into Twitter’s advertising efforts. In April, the company began selling ads called “promoted tweets,” which allows businesses like Best Buy Co., Starbucks Corp. and other companies pay to have messages appear at the top of search pages on the site.
“What advertisers on Twitter are searching for is engagement,” Williams said in an interview. “This will improve that out of the box.” For instance, a movie studio advertising a new film would be able to display a video trailer on Twitter.com, he said.
“Our objective is not to convert people from third-party apps to Twitter.com,” Williams said. “Our aim is to make people more happy and engaged Twitter users, and I think chances are, people would probably use more third-party apps if we can get them started using Twitter.”
Nevertheless, there is no question that on the whole, this is a big step forward for the service. Whether it will help the company bring in revenue is something that neither Williams nor any other executive addressed with any substance Tuesday, though that was, of course, a question on many minds at the press event.