#NewTwitter: The New Twitter is here

Why doesn’t John Mayer seem to get it together? No, we are not talking about him today but you can’t help but think of him when he makes the news by kicking his alleged addiction to Twitter a day before Twitter makes the news by announcing a newly revamped version. Call it bad timing or maybe Jen knew what she was doing that one time!

In four years, Twitter has now undergone its first major facelift to make its 160 million users happy.  CEO Evan Williams announced the new site, which would improve the quality of interaction amongst users and make it a remarkable multimedia experience.

Now, isn’t that a better strategy than to come up with several ‘re-vamps’ Zuckerberg tried doing to the point of infuriating Facebook users? I, for one couldn’t handle the fact that each time I logged in my account, a surprise waited for me. So I am all for changes within a reasonable frame of time.

“As Twitter competes for advertising dollars, it is also seeking to ensure people stay on the website for longer and return more often,” writes Maggie Shiels of BBC News. She reports that Twitter.com “now spreads information over two “panes” instead of over one page. One pane or panel is devoted to the 90 million messages or tweets posted on the site every day. The other features images within the text. Until now, most links to photos and video have been displayed on other websites or browser tabs.

The firm is joining hands with 16 photo and video sites including YouTube, Flickr, DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, Ustream, Vimeo and yfrog to have their visual content embedded on the site.”

“You can now take a simple short tweet and get more context and information in less time,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and co-founder, told BBC News.

Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro adds his opinion: “This redesign, however, doesn’t end one of the more annoying aspects of Twitter readership: Having to guess what page awaits behind somebody’s shortened Web link.”

According to Mashable, it is the “Facebookification of Twitter.” Their reason for stating so is that: “By adding multimedia to the stream, Twitter evolves from a source of information and links to a destination website where users can simply kill time by watching all of the YouTube videos their friends are sharing. While there may not be photo albums on Twitter anytime soon, we could imagine friends checking their Twitter accounts every day (or every hour) to see what photos their friends are tweeting.”

The New York Times also notes that the new Twitter somewhat mirrors Google and Bing in terms of design since it will now offer continuous streams of photographs. Twitter will now create a slideshow from Flickr accounts right on its main page.

The redesigned Twitter.com is not yet available to all users—it’s rolling out as a “preview” over the next several weeks, Twitter says—but you’ll know it when you see it. “We liked the old Twitter but we thought we could make it better. There was a lot buried underneath Twitter and now we are bringing all of that to the surface, ” said Williams. Perhaps, John will ask for a second chance this time around!

Photo Credit: Josh Semans

Orignal Source: www.justmeans.com/-NewTwitter-New-Twitter-is-here/31116.html