Well, “popular” is a bit of an understatement, but yeah, we have more to talk about. So Twitter just revamped their entire UI, if I may call it, in a bid to carve out a more simplistic interface for newbies as well as to appeal to the existing ginormous user base (about a 100 million users — that’s right).
For starters, there’s improved and tightly integrated media viewing within tweets. So if there’s a video or image or even a location that a particular tweet links to, you’ll see a thumbnail waiting for your click (or tap, if you’re on a smartphone/tablet), ready to make your content hum into existence. This seems pretty essential, really, considering the huge time it took to individually click these links and travel to new pages to view the content earlier, and is one of the most obvious changes in the set.
Probably the biggest and most remarkable change, though, is the addition of the “# Discover” section. This is a complete realisation of what Twitter has been only trying or vaguely hinting at in the past, titled “Stories”, and frankly, is amazing. It’s your personalised newspaper, but Twitter-style. You can see stories from stuff you’re interested in, people you follow, stuff of a particular kind you just got interested in; that sort of hocus pocus.
But there’s an added advantage, since it’s Twitter, you get everything fresh from the oven, and everything's really well organised. It still can’t beat a dedicated RSS-based newsreader or aggregator, but it sure as hell is getting close. Plus, it’s a really good starting point for people who’re new to the service. This is where they can figure out what exactly they want from the service — who to follow, what to do, where to go.
The rest of it is basic. There’re aesthetic improvements, yes, but hardly anything looks bad these days. There are a few nitty-gritties — things like embedded tweets have been added to the API, modifications have been made to promotional tweets, and companies can now truly set up their Twitter profiles.
The update, the folks believe, will more firmly establish the design philosophy that their phenomenally successful product has silently been guided by. It sure looks that way. For more, follow us at facebook.com/techchronicle.