Over the last week or so, Twitter has rolled out a new home page design. I'm not sure if everyone's accounts have been updated yet but, if not, they will be. Fortunately, it's not quite as brutal as when Facebook launched their new design because, let's face it, Twitter doesn't have that much in their interface to screw up. Here are the things that have been affected by the new design. If I've missed any, please let me know.

Twitter Search

The most obvious and useful, change they've made is finally adding a search box to the design. (Only took them three years to add standard web functionality...)

So now, instead of having to hunt for the little text link down with the copyright and privacy notices, you can actually do a search directly from the right-hand panel on your page.

Unfortunately, they haven't fixed the underlying problems with the engine itself, like the fact that it can be really slow and doesn't always find stuff that actually exists on the site.

You may have noticed that after you run a search, a link shows up under your Update box near the top of the page that allows you to Save This Search. When you click that, a new link shows up under the Search text box so you can re-run the same search at a later time. I love the concept but I've found the execution to be a bit buggy so far. At times the link disappeared, at other times clicking the link didn't work, etc. But hopefully those things will be fixed at some point.

Public Timeline

The right-hand panel used to have a link for Everyone which would bring up the most recent tweets from everyone on Twitter, whether you follow them or not. That's gone, which is not going over well with a lot of users, so I'm not sure if they'll add it back or not. In the meantime, however, there is a workaround for this.

In the search box, enter "From:" (without the quotation marks) and it will bring up the public timeline and then you can then save the search to be able to have one-click access to it again.

Trending Topics

Under the search text box (or your saved search links, if you have them, is a list of ten topics. These are topics that are currently being tweeted about a lot, so I guess Twitter assumes everyone must be interested in them. Me, I never even look at them. (Although, I have to admit, I'm a little curious as to why KFC is on there...) You can collapse the list by clicking the little up arrow beside the heading.

Following List

The icons of some of the people you're following are still on the panel but, by default, they're not displayed until you click the down arrow beside Following. Based on the comments to the post I linked to earlier, a lot of people are unhappy about this as well, However, I've never understood the value of this, since it shows such a small subset of the number of people you're following, so it doesn't bother me at all.

Still Unchanged

I can NOT believe they didn't add an automatic retweet link or a way to alert people that there are new @Replies that have come in for them. These seem like such obvious requirements to me and I'm sure they'd be incredibly easy to implement, so I really don't know what the problem is. Sigh.

Mentions

This change isn't actually apparent on the home page and they actually implemented it a few weeks ago but, it is, in fact, a good one. It used to be that when you clicked the @Replies link in the right-hand panel, you would see a list of tweets that were replies to your tweets, as long as they began with "@[YOUR USERNAME]". But if that didn't appear at the very beginning, they wouldn't appear there.

Now that page (which is now called @[YOUR USERNAME] rather than @Replies lists any mention of your username, as long as it's prefaced by the @ symbol. Some third-party apps, like TweetDeck, have been doing this for a while, so I'm glad Twitter has seen its value as well.

Now if they'd only let you know when those new mentions (or replies) actually come in. Sigh.

Posted in How To, Social Media, Twitter, User Interface