Twitter Unveils New Designs For Web, Mobile, And TweetDeck

Twitter is releasing a major overhaul on the way users discover content, and how brands share it.

Twitter is rolling out a new set of designs on their Web platform and mobile apps. In what appears to be one of the most drastic changes since the new profiles, Twitter is now putting your information into modules on the Web platform, and focusing more on discovering new things with the mobile apps.

In Twitter’s campaign labeled ”Let’s Fly” (#letsfly) they have simplified their design in what they believe would be an improved user interface (UI) that makes it easier for us to connect with our friends and discover new ones. “ You’ll see this new design both on Twitter.com and mobile phones, so that you’ll have a familiar experience any time, anywhere. We’ve also updated TweetDeck to be consistent with this new version,” as stated on Twitter’s official blog.

They will also be releasing updates for the iPad app in the future. In the mean time the user interface is now focusing on four key areas: Home, Connect, Discover, and your profile. These four tabs will be found on all of their platforms so that the user interface and experience remains the same.

Home is Where Your Friends Are

“Home keeps everything you’re interested in all in one place.” Your current Web based version of Twitter consists of a stream of tweets; and a panel on the right side that includes your follower/following information, suggestions on who to follow, trends, and information about Twitter. The new version will turn these different objects into segmented modules.

Tweets will no longer slide open to reveal more information (replies, conversations, retweets, and multimedia attachments), but they will now open like an accordion to reveal further information.

Connecting to Others

What used to be a place for your to view your last replies will now become a portal for connecting to others. “Interactions shows all the actions other people take related to you and your Tweets. See who follows you, retweets or favorites one of your Tweets, or adds you to a list,” as stated on Twitter’s news release.

Discovering New Things

The Discover tab (identified by the hashtag) now includes Twitter stories. Essentially the story feed will become like a news feed based on a hashtag that you search for. It will include Twitter users that frequently user the hashtag or are an influencer of the keyword, content that is trending, and content that is shared by your friends. It acts very similar to that of Flipboard in that the most shared content will appear in the stories section based on your interests and connections.

The Discover Activity tab will also bring a new way to know what your friends are doing. For Facebook users consider this the part of your news feed that shows when a friend likes something, adds a new friend, or something similar. The activity feed will show when your friends add new people to a list, reply to tweets, favorite a tweet, and retweet items.

New User Profiles and Brand Pages

Similar to the new home page and feed will now be a segmented profile. These profiles separate tweets from user information, lists and users who are relevant to you.

Brand pages will be similar to the new user profiles, but they will also be allowed to create a banner image directly under their user information. It is also likely that they will not be listing other users relevant to them.

According to Adages’s coverage on the brand pages there are two features specific to them:

They can be customized with large header images that advertisers can use to display their logo and tagline more prominently than under the standard format, where branded elements of the page design are often partially covered by the time line of tweets. Brands can also choose to keep a particular tweet at the top of their time line, and that top tweet also auto-expands to reveal an embedded photo or video from Flickr, YouTube or other sources, without requiring the user to take action.

Embeddable Tweets

Remember Blackbird Pie that allowed you to sort of embed a tweet? Probably not because it didn’t work very well. For Posterous and WordPress bloggers you can now embed a tweet by going to its time stamp and getting the URL. Once the new version of Twitter launches anyone will be able to click on a tweets details or permalink and then “Embed this Tweet.” You will then be able to drop the code into an HTML editor, and your tweet will appear.

If you want new Twitter try going to this tweet. Some how it forced mine to work twitter.com/#!/twitter/sta…

— Elliot S. Volkman (@TheJournalizer) December8, 2011

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