Twitter had a “big” press conference yesterday evening. They sent out invitations with little explanation of what was about to be revealed. The invitees felt the excitement in the air, the secret was filling the room and the Twitter employees giddily smiled, barely containing the secret.
Twitter was a flurry of tweets, even people (like me) who were not present in the conference were hanging from every tweet from TechCrunch and others talking about what was going on in the event. First they showed a little egg, obvious allegory to the twitter bird being born (or reborn as the case was), and blog writers present wrote every word coming out of Twitter’s Evan Williams, Jason Goldman and Kevin Cheng.
Little by little the secret came out… Twitter has a new interface!
Twitter has been working for a while in a new two paned interface that allows for seeing pictures and watching videos embedded in your tweets. It is very similar to the Twitter interface available in the iPad app, just set up directly in the official Twitter site. Some people felt this wasn’t such a big announcement, but lets just consider this for a bit.
A question came in the room about Twitter looking more like Facebook, to which Keving Cheng responded clearly that Twitter is Twitter and it is about the tweets. The direction Twitter is taking is becoming more of a news stream, rather than falling under the “Social Network” classification.
Twitter has become a source of information, most people are still trying to figure it out and understand how such a simple thing can be a source of information. My opinion is that this new change will effectively make that clearer. Beyond the images and videos, twitter’s second pane will provide more information to make it clear for new users what twitter is about. The right pane will show related items, mentions, and other streams of information, more like what some of the Twitter applications and clients expert users are accustomed.
Additionally, Twitter has stated that the new Twitter will be faster and more stable, unlike the several “happy Blue Whale” sightings we’ve had recently.
See the video about the new Twitter here: Twitter’s New Interface or below:
So, what do you think? Is Twitter’s new interface really a big announcement? Do you think this is a great improvement?