Now:
Before:
Comparing the old homepage to the new homepage sheds an enormous amount of light on Twitter’s ambitions with its microblogging platform. Here’s the old description text:
“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
And here’s the new text:
“Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”
You immediately notice the deemphasis on your personal network – the people you live, sleep, and work with – and the focus on realtime discovery and world events. Twitter’s stepped away from being branded as a social network, or being compared to Facebook.
The second big change is search – specifically the trending topics. The company not only makes sure you realize that the Twitterverse is talking about things you care about (whether it’s pitcher Mark Buehrle or Blue M&Ms), but it explains them with a conversation bubble that appears when you hover over the question mark icon.
The open and timely exchange of information will have a positive impact on the world and Twitter has a role to play. We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the quality of our search results and trend analysis but repositioning the product to focus more on discovery is an important first step in presenting Twitter to a wider audience of folks around the world who are eager to start engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, events, and sources of information.
We’ll likely continue to make changes to the Twitter home page as we respond to feedback and ideas. We’re eager to see if encouraging a sense of wonder and discovery leads to a better first impression of Twitter.
An interesting thing: It also looks like Twitter is using this new homepage search interface to highlight some of the lesser-used search operators, like the “:)” symbol for results with “positive attitude.”
