If you’re familiar with twitter, you’re probably aware of the hype around the new design lately. The new layout has been rolling out at “random” all over the world. As people get it, they show off using the hashtag #newtwitter (I was one of those people) and for people that don’t have it yet they nag twitter constantly for it. Twitter has had a few changes here and there the past year that has improved usability. One of these included hover cards which allow you to view a person’s info by hovering over their name allowing you to skip a step and not have to click through to their profile page. Another one improved how re tweets function allowing you to better track who’s re tweeting what.
This update on the other hand had one key thing in mind - to keep people on twitter.
Very few people I know that are serious about twitter use the actual twitter.com interface. It allowed you to view your follower’s tweets in chronological order, but not much more than that. Third party apps like Tweetdeck and HootSuite focused on monitoring your name, specific searches (such as #BTV for Burlington), and finally analytics. This was a huge problem for twitter seeing they were providing a service, people were using it, but a majority users were staying off their main site using 3rd party applications.